Visualizing the History of Knowledge Production through the Bibliography of Philosophy

This paper examines prospects for visualizing historical bibliography, which studies the history of books and the people, institutions, and machines surrounding them. These studies have potential for revealing not only the history of knowledge production, but also for examining the evolving structures used to organize, catalog, and conceptualize that knowledge. This paper presents a case study in history of philosophy using data from the largest bibliography in the field, which was parsed to extract structured information about each work and its subject heading. Such data reveal (1) the emergence of particular topics across time and space, (2) transmission of ideas as measured through publication location and version information, and (3) the topical shifts in the field over time as reflected by subject classification of texts. Together, these statistical, geospatial, and network visualizations explore the potential of historical bibliography within the digital humanities.