BROKERS OF THE WORD: AN ESSAY IN THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE EARLY AMERICAN PRESS, 1639-1783

This dissertation explores the social context of printing and publishing from 1639 to 1783 through an analysis of the complete extant record of colonial printing and a collective biography of the printers, publishers and booksellers who comprised the press. Two general areas are explored. The first involves the size, stability, and growth of the press, the second, the structure of the trade at large. The early American press grew like the population it served and was characterized by a marked stability. The broad patterns of production and growth suggest that how much was printed depended largely upon the number of persons in the trade, which, in turn, depended upon successful demographic experiences. In all areas of colonial America, families formed the underlying structure of the trade, and their fortunes were those of the trade itself. The nature and extent of association among tradesmen is also explored. Here, the professional and familial networks of tradesmen are examined both as phenomena of personal association in colonial America and as the structure through which ideas, in the form of printed works, flowed from place to place. The extent of trade networks reached its zenith early in the eighteenth century, and thereafter declined as the size of the trade exceeded the ability of individuals to form associations with other tradesmen. The diminishing networks of tradesmen contributed to a marked provincialism of the early American press which was reflected in the declining inter-regional diffusion of printed works as the eighteenth century progressed

The Princeton Protein Orthology Database (P-POD): A Comparative Genomics Analysis Tool for Biologists

Many biological databases that provide comparative genomics information and tools are now available on the internet. While certainly quite useful, to our knowledge none of the existing databases combine results from multiple comparative genomics methods with manually curated information from the literature. Here we describe the Princeton Protein Orthology Database (P-POD, http://ortholog.princeton.edu), a user-friendly database system that allows users to find and visualize the phylogenetic relationships among predicted orthologs (based on the OrthoMCL method) to a query gene from any of eight eukaryotic organisms, and to see the orthologs in a wider evolutionary context (based on the Jaccard clustering method). In addition to the phylogenetic information, the database contains experimental results manually collected from the literature that can be compared to the computational analyses, as well as links to relevant human disease and gene information via the OMIM, model organism, and sequence databases. Our aim is for the P-POD resource to be extremely useful to typical experimental biologists wanting to learn more about the evolutionary context of their favorite genes. P-POD is based on the commonly used Generic Model Organism Database (GMOD) schema and can be downloaded in its entirety for installation on one's own system. Thus, bioinformaticians and software developers may also find P-POD useful because they can use the P-POD database infrastructure when developing their own comparative genomics resources and database tools