Yes, I am guilty of writing the post for an audience already largely familiar with the context.

I should probably add that the types of "explanations" I put forward in this post are actually not of central concern to me - certainly not explanations derived solely from parsing quantitative results. I'm far more interested in the descriptive evidence this kind of measurement can provide. It can give wider context to what tends to be a very case-study-centric discipline (e.g. oh, this guy happened to work a lot with Italian publishers in this period? We didn't realize it before just looking at 5-10 artists per article/monograph, but actually that is quite exceptional/normal for this period...)

Then again, proposing these kinds of explanations is also something of a disciplinary norm, for better or worse.