Today’s sharing culture calls for investigations of dissemination, accessibility and content reuse in the past. The book examines the conditions for sharing and disseminating information and stories, how cross-border networks interacted with local actors and how text sharing changed over time. It deals with periodicals from several countries from the 17th century to the present. The chapters analyse verbatim reprints as well as creative forms of reuse, local contexts as well as global infrastructures. Some focus solely on periodicals, others on the relationship with other media. The book combines an empirical focus with a pool of historical and methodological expertise. Digital methods are combined with traditional qualitative methods. Focusing on the periodical press is congenial in that it has to a very large extent consisted of (and still consists of) reused content. Reuse is – despite a long historiographical focus on originality and high-profile journalists and publications – constitutive of what periodicals are. The volume is thus highly relevant to both academia and society at a time when the public sphere seems to be imploding under the pressure of orchestrated yet uncontrollable content sharing.
