We will soon be publishing an exploratory interface for the more than 600 reviews, advertisements, and other periodical items that we’ve encoded for our Cultures of Reception project—which explores how the authors in Women Writers Online were discussed in periodicals from 1770 to 1830. In preparation for that interface, we’re also working with Steven Braun, the Data Analytics and Visualization Specialist in the Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group, to set up some visualizations that will help to highlight patterns across the texts in the collection.

Steven recently sent a few prototype visualizations to us and we wanted to share those here, since we’re really excited about them. Essentially, the reviews in Cultures of Reception are tagged by their evaluations, running from “very positive” to “very negative.” The visualizations Steven designed show variations in individual authors’ reception over time by mapping each possible evaluation to an integer value and plotting those evaluations over the course of each author’s lifetime. Positive evaluations are represented by dark green circles (on the upper y-axis), negative evaluations are represented by dark red circles (on the lower y-axis), and partial gradations are colored accordingly in between. Each circle represents a cluster of reception evaluations at that point in time and the size of each circle is proportional to the number of evaluations.

For example, here’s Maria Edgeworth, who was very widely reviewed over a fairly long period of time; her reviews are usually positive, but there are a few negative responses:

And here’s Charlotte Smith, who received more positive responses overall: 

Mary Darby Robinson, by contrast, has a narrower timeframe, with a particularly notable dip in review positivity around 1800 (in responses to The Natural Daughter):

Finally, here’s the collection as a whole:

When we publish the exploratory interface (which should be very soon!), we’ll be including more evaluation visualizations like these, along with others that will show the geographic ranges of periodicals and reviewed texts, the topics covered in the collection, the circulation of reviews and editions—and quite a few more. So, if you’re interested in the reception of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women’s texts (or in transatlantic periodical cultures, publication practices, literary circulation, &c.), watch for the publication announcement here and on our website—and, in the meantime, we hope you enjoy these visualizations!