# CUDAN bibliodata talk

People - authors? - kuidas nimetada neid inimesi seal? praegu authors - people läbisegi.
Variant: ütleme välja et ütleme author, aga selle all mõtleme kõiksugu seotud inimesi.

- hea variant on "actors", mis siis tähistaks kõiki tegutsejaid selles kirjalikus ruumis

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[Esimene graafikuslaid 0- Quick overview (ENB)]

First to show, how you can see real world events in bibliographic data, we can first show the number of books in the bibliography from 1600 onwards. Estonian language books are marked orange, other languages are marked grey here.

In the 17th century, we see two peaks of publishing which the few years that the University of Tartu was able to be open. Outside this period it was closed due to various wars taking place in the region.

We can see World War 1 and World War 2 as drops in publishing and the Restoration of independence in 1991 changing the dynamics once again. So, here these major events that interrupt publishing are clearly visible.

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[Estonian National Bibliography 1800-1940]

So, from the bibliography, we took the time period of 1800-1940, which covers a few interesting changes and captures the emerging Estonian language community emerging. This amounts to about 43 thousand books, with almost 10 thousand author names, and a bit more than 5 thousand that have a confirmed date of birth and are real people. Sometimes the bibliography lists initials and a number of books do not have authors listed.

We did a bit of data harmonization, augmented language information on the works.

To see some more interesting trends here, for example here is the genre make-up for the period for Estonian language books. And you can already see the first steps of an emerging community. At the beginning of the period, the major genres are religious texts and songbooks, that are mostly about collective rituals, and calendars that were at the time centralized sources of practical information.

In the middle of the century, fiction emerges as a very important genres, followed by bureocratic documents, with many many smaller genres emerging as well as you see below. As the reading and writing skills become more common, so does also the diversity of texts being published.

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[1- Growth of the community]

When we zoom in to the period, we can see more closely how the Estonian language publishing builds up on an existing community working with other languages, starting with small steps and growing exponentially throughout the century.

Here we can see also a few historical events, the first world war, which is immediately followed by the Estonian war of Independence. There's a period called russification that started in 1881 that aimed to increase dominance of russian language across the russian empire. In the baltics this was directed mostly at the german language. And the around 1870 it is generally considered the start of the Estonian National Awakening, and we can see also that in the data.

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[1- Languages in the community]

We can look at the proportions of language used and see more closely what happened connected to these historical events.

Perhaps most strikingly, the proportion of books in Estonian increases really gradually throughout the time period quite on its own. It reaches almost complete dominance with the birth of Independent Estonia in 1920s.

We can also see the influence of Russification in the 1880s that very effectively decreases the position of German in the community. However the usage of Estonian language does not seem to be affected by it really. Latin language was replaced by German as it became standard to defend disputations in German language in the University of Tartu around 1860.

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[2- Authors]

As we saw. the number of publications grew quite quickly through the time period. It is notable that also the general population grew in the period, around 2.5 times. However the number of books written in Estonian rose from around 10 to more than a 1000, so all these changes are taking place in a growing population.

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[2- Authors]

When we look at authors in the dataset, we can see a clear growth as in the early 1800s, there are just around 10 authors born each year, while around 1900s, this is already between 100 and 150 authors.

As a result of the new authors entering the community and publishing more books, the average age of an author on a book goes down from mid 50s to mid 40s and then on to around 40. Similar trend can be seen for the author's average age when they publish their first book.

Particularly, we again see a change near 1870, considered the start of national awakening, and the first drop in the 1840s can also be connected with a few new estonian authors emerging.

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[3- Languages for authors]

What is interesting about this change in this historical case is the relationship with the other language culture that already existed here, mostly dominated by the baltic germans.

We can look at this data in more detail, and depict the works of the most prolific authors colored by the language they were written in. We can see how in early on, the main people involved worked mostly in other languages, depicted in blue, here mostly German.

Mid century Estonian works become more common and a number of people show a mixture of the two languages, and by the end of the period - here 1900, the main people are working almost exclusively in Estonian.

For each author we can calculate a lifetime score of the languages used of the share of works in Estonian, from 0 to 100 percent.

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[3- Language dominance of writers]

We can use this metric to visualize the linguistic transition that happened in the period.

Here we have depicted each book by the connected persons lifetime share of books in Estonian, and calculated the mean across all persons associated with published books. To make it more interesting, we looked at authors that worked in Estonian and some other language. I.e. the multilingual authors. There were a number of authors who worked only with Estonian texts, they are excluded here.

We can see that the Estonian language publications become increasingly dominated by people working mostly or exclusively in Estonian. The beginning of the period is clearly dominated by people publishing a few books in Estonian, but working mostly in other languages. This changes by 1850s, when the publishing market is mostly split with both Estonian or Other language dominant authors being authors contributing. And by 1900, the market is led by authors working mostly in Estonian. There are still authors working in the middle or mostly in other languages, but the change is quite visible here.

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