Once the information about nodes, links, and their substantive attributes has been collected, a bit more work is needed to prepare to use the data. This chapter covers this intermediate step, with tips for organizing and cleaning the data. Reading this chapter before collecting the data in the first place will help avoid some serious pitfalls. It covers ethical issues pertaining to collecting names (a necessary step in most methods of network elicitation), a method for automating the cleaning of name data, and robustness checks that can be done to assess the cleaning.

This chapter examines Lucian’s Erotes to explore qustions of authorship and agency. It explores how questions about authorship operate differently for erotic and non-erotic works and the ways in which erotic discourse is more amenable to anonymous or masked authors. The chapter shows how according Lucianic authorship to this text enriches our understanding of other texts by Lucian. It examines how the Erotes functions to critique normative sexual discourse and suggest that in the comparison between men and women as love objects the text underlines the tiredness and conventionality of this debate and the rhetorical tropes that are employed in it. By contrast, this reading of the Erotes seeks to locate the critical frisson of the text (its ‘kink’) in its discussion of the magnitude of male appetite and the way the text correlates sex and the divine.

The chapter discusses the position of victims in international criminal justice and the evolution of their status and modalities of their involvement in the administration of justice by international criminal jurisdictions, with a particular focus on the legal regime of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The chapter highlights the centrality of victims as the core constituency of international criminal law and the mismatch between this aspiration and the limited recognition of their agency and rights before the UN ad hoc tribunals. It then examines how the ICC’s architects have sought to bridge this gap in the Court’s Statute and Rules of Procedure and Evidence. The ICC’s legal framework is unprecedented in this respect. Over and above the protective measures necessary on account of their engagement in the proceedings, it granted victims extensive rights to participate and be legally represented at different stages the ICC proceedings as well as the autonomous right to obtain reparations. The chapter surveys the key challenges this ambitious scheme has raised, as far as the admission of victims to participate, the organisation of their legal representation, and the implementation of reparations are concerned, and solutions that have been developed in the Court’s practice to date.

The Introduction begins by outlining the generative tension of the early modern public sphere: debate and defamation, free speech and false news, went hand in hand. Libels were often vicious and violent. Yet they were also essential to England’s emerging media ecosystem. Drawing from public sphere theory, the first main section conceptualizes the viral circulation of libels across speech, manuscript, print, and performance; and it makes the case that theater – urban and provincial, amateur and professional alike – was central to their multimedia careers. The next section follows the intertwined semantic, cultural, and legal histories of libel from the 1550s to the early 1600s. In the process, it identifies a clear and enduring paradigm of libel: as anonymous, extralegal accusation. The third section returns to theater history, tracing the same logic to the core of efforts to regulate the stage. After surveying the relevant scholarship on dramatic censorship, it pins the theater’s proximity to libeling on the vexed question of audience interpretation. The Introduction finally locates the late Elizabethan scenes of libel in the context of the anxious years of the long 1590s (1588–1603).

The epilogue situates the foregoing chapters in a longer theater history, tracing two early Stuart scenes of libel – in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (c.1605) and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) – to their late Elizabethan roots. In Nobody and Somebody, the titular characters reenact in a comic vein Heywood’s story of Jane Shore and Richard III from Edward IV. At once a folk hero and a figure for libel, Nobody plays on his constitutive anonymity to affiliate himself with the same seditious, defamatory talk of which he is falsely accused. The Roman Actor likewise revises the paradigm of libel formulated by its dramatic predecessor, in this case Jonson’s Poetaster. In the play’s metatheatrical opening scenes, the actor Paris rehearses Jonsonian arguments to vindicate himself from accusations of libel leveled by the corrupt tribune and spy, Aretinus. Yet the rest of Massinger’s play belies Paris’s defense of playing, laying bare the unresolved ironies at the heart of Jonson’s satirical project. Finally, the epilogue returns in closing to the constitutive tensions – between protest and threat, free speech and false news – that animated the early modern public sphere.

This chapter traces the development of donor-conception regulation in the United States. It shows the evolution of laws concerning anonymity, addressing how the legal and pragmatic contexts for nondisclosure are changing, and it also points out that the feasibility of promising anonymity to donors is no longer viable. As sperm and egg banks increasingly offer the possibility of identity release donors, as genetic testing becomes more widespread, as donor-conceived people strengthen their advocacy, and as other countries end anonymity, new legal approaches are developing in the United States. The law is beginning to respond to the interests of donor-conceived people. The questions moving forward thus become how best to counsel donors, the intending parent(s), and donor-conceived offspring about their options, and how best to respond to emerging reproductive technologies.

Over the last two decades, researchers have sought to understand whether and to what extent donor-conceived people are motivated to seek contact with donors and donor siblings. This chapter contributes to this literature by focusing on donor-conceived adults’ everyday experiences living with anonymity and absence across the life course. Drawing on the concept of ‘haunting’ and combining reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with Australian donor-conceived adults (N = 28) and vignettes of personal experience, I elucidate how anonymity and absence reshape flows between past, present and future, altering personhood and relationality. I argue that framing anonymity as an issue of the past (re)produces ongoing haunting and that reform without concomitant processes of truth-telling and redress represent an injustice to those who continue to live with the lingering impacts of such past conditions. More broadly, this work expands sociological conceptualisations of family by attending to how familial (non-)relationships shape belonging.

This essay explores the strange, winding, and sometimes hotly debated formation of the Defoe canon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It pays particular attention to the state of Defoe attributions in the twenty-first century. What emerges from tracing the history of Defoe’s anonymous productions, their circulation, and processes of attribution is an ongoing transformation in our sense of Defoe as an author. Whether we know Defoe primarily as a proto-novelist or as a political pamphleteer is much more a product of the processes by which anonymous works have been attributed to him than a reflection of what he may actually have written.

What has triggered this new concern with an impersonal yet singular life? In what sense do these formal innovations in contemporary aesthetics open up new ways to understand shared experience? In the belief that the analysis and reading of these cultural practices can help us foster the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences, this chapter wishes to unlock the ethical and political challenges of our time as they are elaborated and discussed in contemporary art practices by Teixeira Coelho, Diamela Eltit, Sergio Chejfec, Rosângela Rennó, Gian Paolo Minelli, and Claudia Andujar.

The recipient interview is primarily psycho-educational in nature. The fertility counselor strives to understand the recipients’ family building goals and help them frame their unique “family story.” Preparation for disclosure to the potential child has become increasingly important, due to the technological and genetic impact on donor anonymity and growing openness. Societal changes have brought about expansion in the types of recipients seeking treatment, as well as greater diversity in the cultural background of both donors and recipients. The recent worldwide pandemic has also caused an increase in virtual counseling.Fertility counselors need to be open and flexible while integrating these changes into our work with recipients. Fertility counselors are essential not only at the outset of the recipient journey, but are increasingly seen as a valuable lifelong resource to be consulted at different stages in the experience of being a donor-conceived family.

In one of the reviews of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, an anonymous reviewer for the Swedenborgian Christian Spiritualist conceives of Whitman’s poetry (and poetry more broadly) as aligning with a tradition of spiritual mediumship.1 The great poets, that is, possess a medial capacity to channel and develop a “spiritual intercourse” with the muse, who is herself part of the transcendent realm. Having distinguished between the “two permanent types” of media – those singular agents who are lucky enough to receive “direct influx” from the divine source of love and wisdom, and a “second class of media” that channel “individual Spirits” and “societies of Spirits” – the reviewer proceeds to outline what is happening to the idea of mediumship as society transitions into a new and disorienting phase. “Many varieties of Mediumship,” the reviewer argues, “must be expected” in this moment of social and political turmoil, and not all of them either savory or desirable. The present age now produces imitators who merely “pour forth as Divine Revelations the froth and scum of a receding age”; confidence men who give “false notions of the state of man after death”; as well as other suspect figures who merely “come in contact with the outmost portion of the Spirit-life.” Then there are those more exceptional beings, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who “receive influxes from the upper mind-sphere of the age” and “[see] the future of truths as our Spirit-seers discern the future of man.”2

Freedom of expression and association are at once themselves fundamental human rights and also necessary for the promotion and protection of other rights. In many contexts, anonymity is essential for the realization of these rights, affording citizens the ability to speak without fear of retribution. Yet while there is a growing acknowledgement of the importance that anonymity plays in enabling free expression and association in the online world, debates about the right to remain anonymous in the physical world are lagging behind.

The Epilogue considers anonymous pamphlets printed in the later part of King James’s reign that deploy the female voice as a form of political critique: Ester Hath Hang’d Haman, Hic Mulier, Haec Vir, and Muld Sacke. Of the cross-dressing pamphlets, Haec Vir in particular recruits the female voice for its association with militant Elizabethan values and the freedom of the subject, while the pseudonymous author Esther Sowernam ventriloquizes Esther, the biblical heroine who confronts the king. The female voice occupied a unique position in the seventeenth-century political landscape, allowing women writers to critique abuses of male power without compromising their position as dutiful subjects. Unlike the freedoms achieved by male citizens at the expense of women later in the seventeenth century, the “reasonable libertie” sought by men and women in early Stuart England authorized the voice of the wife/subject as a powerful political tool.

Part V presents an overview of different fixers’ career trajectories in the larger context of the international news economy and shifting meta-narratives about Turkey and Syria. Fixers find opportunities to contribute to the news behind the scenes, even as their counterparts in the domestic Turkish media face political and economic hardship, and even as Syria has become an inhospitable environment for journalists. Many fixers nonetheless find it difficult to challenge dominant narratives imposed by foreign reporters and news organizations, and so end up moving on to different pursuits. Turnover of both fixers and foreign reporters is continual and counterintuitively contributes to the stability of the system of international news production. The book concludes with a discussion of emergent forms of social media–based information brokerage in newsmaking in comparison with the longer-standing tradition of local fixers assisting foreign reporters.

This chapter explains the value of incorporting materialist analysis into studies of intellectual history and the history of science by examining the curious case of a tiny anonymous herbal that was one of the most popular English books of the sixteenth century. It shows that these works of natural history have been receiving increased attention from scholars and that this scholarship is unfortunately limited by too much attention upon herbals’ authors to the detriment of those figures who commissioned, marketed, made, and sold botanical books to an eager early modern public.

Context, plot, character and theme have dominated modern critical understandings of Wilkie Collins’s fiction, and there are relatively few discussions of his idiom, tone or voice. Collins himself seems to have encouraged this approach to his work, and repeatedly downgraded the question of literary style. But the topic takes us to the heart of his work, and helps us both to understand the nature and quality of his achievement and to see the relationship within it between questions of language and signification and those of identity and the sense of self.  Collins is fascinated in many of his fictions by what it means to have a troubled, false or non-existent identity, to have bodies and sensations that are not properly one’s own; the most revelatory texts and inscriptions in his work are often anonymous or unstylised. This chapter is about how Collins’s work explores and exposes the vulnerability of style, as it stages style’s appearances and disappearances.

The right to know one’s genetic origins should not be recognised as a moral right because it protects no important interest. The knowledge of one’s genetic origin is neither sufficient nor necessary for the construction of one’s identity. The suffering of some donor-conceived people is based on the misconception that this knowledge is necessary. The empirical evidence generated by psychological research on donor-conceived families has shown convincingly that not knowing that one is donor conceived and knowing about one’s donor conception but not knowing one’s donor does not lead to significant differences in psychological well-being and family functioning. A new argument by some people who favour donor identifiability is that donor anonymity can no longer be guaranteed. Although correct, this fact has no implications for the normative claim about the right to know. If anonymity was agreed between donor and recipients, this agreement should be respected even when, or especially when, it can be broken.