2010
Volume 4 Number 2
Abstract
This extended interview between founding H-Urban editor Wendy Plotkin and H-Urban
reviews editor Sharon Irish traces the early history of online scholarly
communication via H-Net, H-Urban, and COMM-ORG, informed by Plotkin’s background as a
planner and community activist in the 1970s and 1980s. After work with community
development corporations on the East Coast, Plotkin entered graduate school in urban
history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During this period in the early
nineties, Plotkin had a job with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and then
collaborated on the development of the forum that became H-Net. In addition to
standards and protocols about new communication technologies, face-to-face
relationships grew out of online exchanges, often with lively disagreements about the
direction of H-Net. Plotkin’s own broadening use of digital tools prompts her
concluding reflections on historians’ continuing need to use the Internet to overcome
physical and intellectual fragmentation, and how the Internet has democratized the
field of history.
Preamble
For three years now (2007-10), I have been the project coordinator for the
Community Informatics Initiative of the
Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Community informatics (CI) is an emerging
field, with continuing debates about definitions and core questions. Informatics is
the study of information systems and processes, including computational, social, and
individual cognition. CI, with its social emphasis, aims to understand not only how
communities access, create, organize, and share information, but also the types and
qualities of connections between and among communities. CI scholars and practitioners
examine the uses of information and communication technologies in
geographically-distinct and underserved areas, and work with local communities to
achieve their goals. This focus stresses that reciprocity must characterize
relationships that involve the distribution and use of information. Community members
spearhead both naming the issues of the community and the process leading to
solutions.
As an historian, I puzzle over which concepts contributed to the emergence of
community informatics. One convergence of ideas I wanted to investigate occurred in
the 1990s. Seventeen years ago, in 1993, Wendy Plotkin was a graduate student in
urban history at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her graduate
assistantship gave her an early entrée to the world of computers and the Internet.
She used this experience to become a key participant in the launching of
H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences on
Line), an organization devoted to using the Internet for scholarly communication,
together with a professor of political history, Richard Jensen, and another graduate
student, Kelly Richter, who specialized in Civil War history. The first of the
scholarly forums was
H-Urban, which
Wendy established as a model for the later forums, and which is how I came to know
her.
Wendy and I met in person for the first time in Chicago, Illinois, in July 2008,
after having developed a virtual relationship since 2002, when I became review editor
for H-Urban. I wanted to document her memories and ideas relating to the early years
of H-Urban. During two conversations in Chicago — one at a noisy restaurant in
Greektown and a second follow-up meeting in the Italian neighborhood near the campus
of the University of Illinois at Chicago — Wendy shared her insights about online
scholarly communication. Our conversations then continued in email exchanges between
Wendy and me that covered the history of H-Net and H-Urban, her growing interest in
geospatial technologies, and her ideas for future projects. This article thus takes
the form of an extended interview in three parts. The first focuses on Wendy’s
background as a planner and community activist in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. The
second examines her decision to become a historian upon her return to Chicago (her
hometown) in 1990, and her involvement in the creation of H-Net, H-Urban, and
COMM-ORG, in the subsequent decade. The third considers her broadening use of digital
tools, reflections on historians’ continuing need to use the Internet to overcome
physical and intellectual fragmentation, and ideas about how the Internet has
democratized the field of history.
— Sharon Irish
Participating in the Community Revolution of the 1970s
| Sharon Irish | Wendy, your background in urban planning and policy (especially your years of
employment in Boston on housing and economic development issues) really influenced
your historical scholarship. Would you talk a bit about this period of your life,
and the relationships between planning and your work in urban history? |
| Wendy Plotkin | After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with an
undergraduate degree in history (1971), I headed to Boston. I worked in several
jobs at the regional planning agency, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), first in housing and then in
transportation.[1] In the mid-eighties, I got a
master’s degree from Tufts University in urban and environmental policy (1983-87),
writing a thesis on the Boston Housing Partnership, a major community development
project.[2]
|
| | After getting my master’s, I worked for the state of Massachusetts (1985-87)
during the administration of Governor Michael Dukakis. Amy Anthony, the director
of the Executive Office of Communities and Development (EOCD), found innovative
ways to help the community development corporations (CDCs) that were becoming
prominent players in the creation of Massachusetts housing and business by that
time. Then, as now, it was difficult for CDCs to secure operating funds; most of
the available funding was for specific projects, putting the proverbial cart
before the horse. The CDCs with which we worked didn’t have the money to function
and train people in development before becoming involved in complex projects. EOCD
provided CEED (Community Economic Enterprise Development) funds that enabled them
to do just that, and I worked on “Special Projects.”
[3]
|
| | From 1987-89, I worked for the city of Boston, helping CDCs get financing for
housing and commercial projects. I was the liaison between the banks and the CDCs
in securing loans that were packaged with federal and state subsidy and tax credit
programs. By that time, I had also became personally involved with the Fenway CDC, which functioned in the
neighborhood in which I lived. The Fenway CDC was a nationally known organization
that had its roots in fighting arson-for-profit. In the 1980s, it organized
against gentrification, developing affordable and ecologically sound housing that
included long-term subsidies to maintain a racially and economically diverse
neighborhood. I saw up close, not only the economic, but also the social benefits
accruing to community members who participated in decisions that affected their
lives. They helped to influence the course of development in their neighborhoods,
and experienced strong communal ties that grew as a result of their
collaboration. |
| Irish | This aspect of your work intersects with community informatics because it values
participatory decision-making, using a variety of tools to build strong
relationships and coalitions. |
| Plotkin | Yes. And I was particularly impressed by what might be considered an early form of
low tech “community informatics,” in the work of Urban Planning Aid. Urban
Planning Aid was a consulting firm established by MIT and Harvard students in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1966 to “provide
technical and informational assistance and promote transfer of skills to low
income community and workplace groups in Eastern Massachusetts around issues of
housing, industrial health and safety, media access, and backup
research.” [Urban Planning Aid 1972] I became aware of them through their publication Less Rent: More Control: A Tenant’s Guide to Rent Control in
Massachusetts when I became involved in an action contesting a rent
increase in my Beacon Hill building in 1974.[4]
|
| Irish | Beacon Hill…pretty impressive! |
| Plotkin | Not really - I lived on the less famous side of Beacon Hill, which had a legacy
steeped in sailors, prostitutes, and Jewish immigrants. Its housing stock
consisted of old three- and four-story apartment buildings, not the Georgian-style
mansions on the other side. Massachusetts’ 1972 rent control law required
landlords to maintain their properties, and my neighbors and I documented the
deficiencies in the building and asked the owners to deal with these prior to
being considered for a rent increase. |
| | Over the years, Urban Planning Aid produced a series of similar manuals, such as
Tenants First: A Research and Organizing Guide to FHA
Housing and How to Use OSHA (the landmark Occupational Health and
Safety Act of 1973). They also warned of the perils that existed in reliance on
community development corporations because of their roles as developers and
owners, which would blunt their potential as activists on behalf of
tenants.[5]
|
| Irish | And yet…you became involved in the Fenway CDC. |
| Plotkin | I think that this is because, at heart, I am a moderate, and I wasn’t ready to
rule out the benefits to be gained by CDCs, as more radical activists were. While
I understood the arguments made by those critical of CDCs, I thought that they
represented the possibility of a more socially-conscious, benign type of
development, especially if there were external mechanisms — such as the existence
of tenant advocacy groups — that would co-exist with them to temper any turn to
parochialism and profit orientations. What attracted me to either type of
organization — CDC or advocacy group — was their potential for involving
“ordinary citizens” in the decisions that affected their daily lives, the
goal that Saul Alinsky so well expressed. |
| | Because of my more moderate approach to “community organizing,” it is not
surprising that I became an academic and an educator, rather than an activist. I
was more interested in investigating society’s dynamics than in siding
unequivocally with one side or the other. Furthermore, as an academic, I created
H-Urban and Comm-Org to encourage academics and professionals to share scholarship
with each other, rather than to disseminate it to “ordinary citizens.”
|
| | These choices suggest the increasing distance that grew between my past and career
as an academic. However, my years in Boston impressed on me the value of
collaboration, something that was given short shrift in the academic discipline
that I chose, history. As a graduate student at Tufts, as a participant in
neighborhood organizations, and as a professional providing resources to
community-based organizations, I was engaged in enterprises that involved — and
were strengthened by — collaboration. When I returned to Chicago in 1989, it was
this appreciation for partnership that would be the most important influence on
how I applied the digital revolution to the field of history. |
History, the Digital Revolution, H-Net, and H-Urban/Comm-Org
| Irish | 1989 was, thus, a major turning point in your life. After working in Boston for
seventeen years, you decided to return to Chicago, your hometown, and re-enter
academia for a Ph.D. in urban and American history. Why did you decide to leave
planning and become a historian? |
| Plotkin | In fact, when I returned to Chicago, I considered entering a Ph.D. program in
either planning or history. I did not feel that I had adequate
training to address the complex issues that planners dealt with, and, if I were to
continue as a planner, I wished to have more time to explore the theoretical
issues (e.g., the “greater good,” competing visions of the “ideal”
physical environment) and to strengthen my planning skills. This is where chance
played a role. I interviewed with both the history and planning departments at the
University of Illinois at Chicago; the historian with whom I met was far more
interested in my joining the program than the planner. Furthermore, I had never
lost my appreciation for history in Boston, and I always saw history as another
route to the goal of understanding how cities operated. |
| Irish | You worked with Perry Duis and Richard Fried at the University of Illinois in
Chicago, finishing your doctorate in 1999. Your dissertation was on the dynamics
of urban neighborhoods in Chicago, with a special focus on racial deed
restrictions and restrictive covenants. These are legal documents that limit
access to housing on the basis of racial categories and/or religious affiliation,
is that right? |
| Plotkin | Yes. My interest in racial deed restrictions was stimulated by my community
experiences in Boston. CDCs were part of a major movement in the 1960s and 1970s
that endorsed the concept of neighborhood-based control, itself an outgrowth of
the emphasis on “participatory democracy.” As a person who had witnessed
(during my childhood) the use of such control to thwart racial integration in
Chicago — one of the most segregated cities in the nation — I wanted to explore
this “negative” type of community organizing, so as to raise consciousness
about the darker side of neighborhood-based control, and alert newer organizations
to the dangers of parochialism. I was especially interested in the use of racial
deed restrictions by developers and neighborhood groups, because, contrary to
public understanding, these were an example of de jure discrimination in the
North. My current book, Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing and
Restrictive Covenants in Chicago, 1900-1953, is nearly finished, and I
have a website entitled “Racial and Religious Restrictive Covenants in the United
States and Canada” on the topic. A follow-up project, entitled Deeds of
Whiteness, will be a national study of these restrictions.[6]
|
| Irish | Let’s turn now to your involvement with computers in the early 1990s. |
| Plotkin | While I was a graduate student at UIC, I had a job working with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
The TEI is an international collaboration (then funded by the National Endowment
for the Humanities and its European counterparts) to pave the way for digital
versions of literary and linguistic texts, including historical ones.[7]
|
| | Working at the TEI triggered my interest in the effects of digitization on the
production of history. In 1991, I decided to do an independent study on the
subject, and chose faculty member Richard Jensen to guide me. Richard was already
legendary for his intellectual contributions to political history (contributing to
the “ethnocultural” and “quantitative history” schools with his landmark
The Winning of the Midwest
[8]). However, it was his activities in
training historians in the use of computers for quantitative methods that led me
to him. From 1971 to 1982, he served as the founding director of the Newberry
Library’s Quantitative Institute, which trained over 800 scholars in using
quantitative methods in history. Certain similarities existed between Jensen’s
goals for the institute and H-Net. Both brought together scholars with similar
interests in an emerging field of history, and tended to attract participants from
smaller universities and colleges who had fewer networking opportunities than
those with larger faculties and student bodies [Jensen 1983]. |
| | At the time I approached Richard, I think he was already expanding his interest
to include the qualitative uses of computers in history, especially in scholarly
communication.[9] Working with him, in 1991-92, I researched and wrote a
paper entitled “The Use of Electronic Texts in the Historical
Profession,” interviewing historians, librarians, publishers,
archivists, and documentary editors.[10]
|
| | Towards the end of my work on the paper, Richard invited me to meet with him and
Kelly Richter, another graduate student in history. The two of them had begun
discussing creating an online scholarly history forum, using the “bulletin
board” technology that was one of the early popular means of connecting
individual computers. However, I recommended that this new forum instead use
Listserv, a more advanced technology I had familiarity with through my work at the
TEI. Listserv was superior to the “bulletin board” technology in a number of
ways: it had the advantage of automatically creating “logs” of all messages,
as well as having the capability of storing files. Thus, in creating H-Net,
Richard, Kelly, and I decided to use Listserv as the communications software. |
| Irish | What was H-Net like in its infancy? |
| Plotkin | It was exhilarating, one of the most exciting times in my life. The three of us
took a memorable road trip to Washington, D.C. and the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) in October, 1992 (and also celebrated Richard's birthday). We
stopped in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on a crisp, cold, fall day, and Kelly saw the
name of an ancestor on one of the gravestones. In Washington, we visited both the
American Historical Association (AHA) and the NEH, and shared our ideas with them.
Both organizations were encouraging. We went back to UIC and prepared an
application for funding by NEH. The first grant was turned down, but the second
one, submitted after H-Net had begun operations, succeeded. Thus, H-Net began with
funding only from UIC and the volunteer services of people such as Kelly and me,
although Jim Mott, a former student of Jensen who was a programmer in statistical
analysis (SPSS), soon added his expertise. |
| Irish | What was your role in creating and shaping H-Net? |
| Plotkin | I had proposed to Richard that I create the first H-Net list, on urban history. He
agreed, and we discussed a name. I suggested Urban-H, and he said that H-Urban
would be better — all of the subsequent lists would begin with H-. I agreed, and began planning H-Urban. |
| | In 1993, what came to be called the Internet was already in operation, although
in its more primitive stages, and there were a few history forums on it. However,
these were a mix of serious and amateur historians, and the quality was mediocre,
for the most part (the classical scholars were far ahead).[11] Thus, when we created H-Net and H-Urban, we consciously set out to develop
something that would be different — that would be dominated by scholars and
practitioners in auxiliary disciplines, and that would have a scholarly tone.
Unlike the more free-wheeling online groups on history at the time, H-Net
incorporated a strong commitment to core values in academia, including deference
to more established scholars and high standards for the content of scholarly
communication. Our goal was to wed the best contemporary practices in humanities
scholarship to the new possibilities opened up by the Internet. To do this, we
created “moderated” lists, in which all messages would have to go through an
advanced graduate student, faculty member, or practitioner. Early on, possibly
after the lists had started, we also decided that each list should have a
“board” of the leading scholars in the field. Thus, drawing on the
democratic nature of the early Internet, I began to write to urban historians of
some repute, and asked them to serve on H-Urban's board. Most agreed. We created
the idea of separate lists for the board, and Edboard-Urban was born. |
| | On February 24, 1993, I sent out the first H-Urban (and H-Net) message; many more
followed. The messages were a mix of announcements, queries, and attempts to
promote discussion — the latter the least successful, unless we were discussing
urban poetry or urban films. In those early days, as a graduate student, I took
the time to abstract book reviews in the major journals, and also to develop
mini-essays on a variety of urban historical topics. When key urban historians
passed away, I'd summarize the major obituaries or write one myself. I began to
combine conversations on the same topic, and to store them on the Listserv
“fileserv” (or server), alerting our subscribers that they could obtain
this summary with an e-mail with a command such as “Get Electric Streetcars.”
Membership grew from 25 to 50 to over 100. (We are now over 2,000.) |
| Irish | What about the other early H-Net groups? |
| Plotkin | H-Urban was not alone for long. H-Women followed soon, as did H-Ethnic, H-Film,
H-Family, H-Teach, H-Labor, H-Law, H-Medieval, H-Politics, H-CivWar, H-South,
H-SHGAPE, HOLOCAUS and H-Antisemitism, HAPSBURG, H-Albion, H-Asia, H-Africa,
H-Business, H-Diplo, H-Film, H-German, H-Grad, H-Ideas, H-Judaic, H-Latam,
H-Local, H-Oz, H-PCAACA, H-State, H-West (I am probably forgetting a few). A few
of these lists pre-dated H-Net, and eventually became H-Net lists in the first
years of the organization, incorporating H-Net’s more scholarly approach and
features when they did. |
| | Beyond this list of names, I think it is useful to emphasize the extent to which
H-Net became a “virtual community,” one that, for many of us, was more
meaningful than the cohort groups at our places of work. At the time, graduate
students and faculty members who were interested in the use of the Internet were
in the minority, and H-Net brought us together in a medium that allowed ongoing,
easy contact. |
| | Furthermore, in spite of the assertion that involvement in the Internet led to
social isolation, important personal and professional relationships formed among
us. At least in my own case, the chance to meet these colleagues face to face
enhanced, although it did not replace, these relationships. |
| Irish | Did you stay involved in H-Net after you started H-Urban? |
| Plotkin | Yes, the other lists initially used H-Urban as a model, and I began to teach the
other moderators how to use Listserv. We created H-Staff and H-Editor, and used
these in-house lists to discuss how to run these new types of forums. Each list
had to create standards for subscription and postings, with the goal of nurturing
“virtual communities” of scholars and students in similar fields. There
were questions about the extent to which this new tool should be used to
democratize scholarly communication; for example, should H-Net conform to
traditional scholarly and copyright standards? Some argued that the Internet
should be used to do away with many of the hierarchical and proprietary practices
within academia; others thought that these should be maintained at the same time
that a more informal means of communication was offered. |
| Irish | Where did you stand? |
| Plotkin | I am a traditionalist, and thus I supported the second of the above views. For
example, I argued that all postings should include a signature and an
institutional affiliation, and, ideally, the academic status of the author. My
argument for doing this was not to defend special privileges for those higher up
on the ladder, but to provide H-Urban and H-Net readers with the background
necessary to appraise the contributions of those who posted, and to promote the
networking goals of the lists. |
| Irish | Would you say that you represented the mainstream or the minority in your
views? |
| Plotkin | Probably the mainstream, at the time. I had significant differences over copyright
with Richard Jensen, which led to tension between us. Richard argued for a more
liberal approach in borrowing material for use on the Internet; I disagreed.
Meanwhile, those who posted to the lists began to test other boundaries early on —
from sending e-mail with no capitalization to offering political tracts on current
or historical topics.[12] While
this occurred on all lists, lists such as H-Antisemitism and HOLOCAUS had special
difficulties, with Holocaust deniers insisting on their rights to post. The
editors of these lists stood firm in refusing to entertain discussions of marginal
or questionable scholarship, and, in so doing, did H-Net a service in establishing
a reputation for scholarliness. |
| Irish | What were some of the highlights of these early years? |
| Plotkin | For me, the most important was when H-Urban became the first list to invite a
moderator from outside of the United States (Alan Mayne, then at University of
Melbourne, now at University of South Australia). This, and the international
membership, added a “multicultural” element to H-Net. Less traveled scholars
such as I learned about the reverse of seasons in the northern and southern
hemispheres, the different “summer” vacations of scholars in different parts
of the world, and the range of academic titles and ranks in different
countries.[13] The expansion of the list staffs
also created a community of editors within each list, among whom policies and
practices were discussed and refined. Soon after Alan joined me, others followed:
Martha Bianco (a graduate student and then instructor at Portland State
University), Mark Peel (a historian at Monash University, Australia), Maureen
Flanagan (a historian at at Michigan State University), and Keith Tankard (then a
historian at Rhodes University in South Africa). Our first non-historian was
Mickey Lauria, a leading planning scholar, who is among the longest serving
editors. |
| | To accommodate decision-making among us, we created the first “editors list”
(Edit-Urban) for discussion of policy. Soon, we established the “editors'
manual,” which was a list of our policies. This grew over time as more
decisions were made, and became a resource for training new editors. We debated
such things as enforcing proper grammar (after someone sent in a posting in the
e.e. cummings mode of all lower case), and agreed that we would require proper
grammar and would retain the right to edit postings. We began to check and expand
citations of scholarship that were sent in, and, as history resources became more
numerous on the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1993 and 1994, we added links to
information about scholarship. We also reserved the right to reject
“non-scholarly” postings. |
| Plotkin | H-Urban posted the first book review on H-Net (long before we had a formal review
system), and also introduced the idea of a subscriber's survey. |
| Irish | With all of this time given to H-Urban, did you start to shift your focus away
from H-Net as a whole? |
| Plotkin | Yes, for a variety of reasons. I needed to focus on my dissertation and other
graduate studies, so as to develop the traditional historical skills and knowledge
that would give me credibility within the historical community. Thus, I only had
so much time to give to H-Net and H-Urban, and H-Urban increasingly took much of
my time. The policy disagreements that I had had with Richard Jensen about H-Net
made me more inclined to devote time to H-Urban. Not only that, but I was not
primarily interested in the administrative, technical, or even policy aspects of
H-Net and H-Urban — I was in it primarily for the scholarly benefits it had to
offer. |
| | Finally, H-Net stayed at UIC for only two years, and moved in 1995 to Michigan
State University. Thus, graduate students and faculty at Michigan State University
began to take more of the leadership and staffing roles. |
| Irish | Why did H-Net move to Michigan State University? |
| Plotkin | Michigan State (MSU) was more willing than UIC to invest in H-Net, and H-Net’s
rising star, Mark Kornbluh, was a faculty member in the History Department. |
| Irish | How did the change in location affect H-Net? |
| Plotkin | Well, first, Michigan State made a major financial commitment to H-Net, and this
investment allowed H-Net to take advantage of the powerful technology of the WWW,
and to provide a permanent technical and training staff. This was a scenario that
fulfilled the commitment of Mark Kornbluh, and another H-Net activist, Peter
Knupfer, to move H-Net beyond just e-mail lists. |
| Irish | Was there anyone who disagreed with this scenario? |
| Plotkin | Yes, in fact — Richard Jensen and Jim Mott — and this turned out to be the crux of
the 1997 H-Net election. I should give you a bit of background on this. |
| | In 1994, H-Net had organized itself and elected Richard Jensen as Executive
Director for a three year term. At the same time, Mark Kornbluh was elected as the
chair of the H-Net Executive Board. In 1997, H-Net had its first contested
election for executive and associate directors: Richard Jensen and Jim Mott
against Mark Kornbluh and Peter Knupfer. |
| | Each of the slates had a different vision for H-Net. Richard Jensen argued for a
reliance on the discussion lists as the core of H-Net, while Mark Kornbluh
advocated for the development of WWW pages to augment the discussions. In the end,
the H-Net editors elected Mark Kornbluh and Peter Knupfer as Executive and
Associate Director, and H-Net developed according to their vision ([Marcus 1996], [Guernsey 1997]). |
| Irish | Which vision did you support? |
| Plotkin | The Kornbluh-Knupfer one. It was my interest in digitization of texts that had led
to my involvement in H-Net, and I was fascinated by the possibilities of making
primary and secondary documents available on the WWW, as well as teaching and
other materials. On H-Urban, we created an annotated list of WWW sites related to
urban history. We increased our production of book reviews, and created a Teaching
Center, with scores of syllabi.[14]
|
| Irish | Did these features add to H-Urban’s success? |
| Plotkin | Definitely, largely because we were able to attract dedicated and committed
scholars such as Clay McShane, Roger Biles, and you to take on the book review and
other features![15]
|
| Irish | Did you have a web designer, as well, or did H-Net do the web design? |
| Plotkin | We were extremely fortunate to have Charlotte Agustin, a historian with an M.A. in
history, working as a web designer for us. Charlotte was an outstanding designer,
who developed and maintained the all of the H-Urban webpages. However, Charlotte’s
contribution went well beyond that. She has a fine analytical mind, and
participated in the intellectual decisions that went into the Teaching and
Weblinks pages, eventually, in effect, taking over all aspects of the teaching
site, including editing and posting the syllabi, among our most popular products.
Charlotte and I shared a belief in the significance of producing syllabi that had
a consistent format and complete citation information on the readings, which added
to the time needed to process them. However, I believe that it is this effort that
made our syllabus collection stand out from others on the web, although Charlotte
had to step back from her intense activity with H-Urban to return to
income-producing activities. |
| Irish | You worked very hard, as I recall, trying to generate discussion on H-Urban. You
contacted leading scholars in the field, asking them to contribute substantial
commentary on significant urban history questions so that you could post these
online and moderate a discussion. It wasn’t a resounding success, was it? Why
not? |
| Plotkin | Because those of us who created H-Net had not really taken into account the
significant obstacles that stood in the way of online discussion among historians
in college and university settings, especially in the United States. Most
important was an academic reward system that favored formal, print, peer-reviewed
communication (as opposed to ongoing, informal, online communication). Such a
system produced so much pressure on academics to publish and teach that there was
little time left for informally broadening their horizons in an international and
interdisciplinary forum. |
| | I had hoped to encourage a flowing discussion of major arguments and assertions
within urban history. However, most historians preferred to use their research and
writing time to put these ideas on paper for publications that would garner them
credit rather than on a public Internet list. Note that it is not the online
environment that was necessarily the most important aspect here, but the emphasis
within academia of formal, peer-reviewed communication manifested in books,
articles, and reviews. |
| Irish | Were there any other factors that discouraged discussion? |
| Plotkin | One that relates to urban history, I believe. Urban history has increasingly
fragmented into distinct geographical, chronological, and thematic domains.
National boundaries still act as barriers to comparative work, and, in the United
States, most historians of 18th, 19th, and 20th century cities show little
interest in seeking continuities with the earlier cities in the rest of the world.
This is partly because they believe that the “modern” city was a significant
departure, if not a complete break, from earlier cities, but also because the
continents seem so different. |
| | Similar barriers exist between political, social, cultural and other historians of
cities, who have not succeeded, I believe, in establishing connections between
their findings. |
| | These differences limit the ability of many urban historians to develop and
discuss their topics in a comparative framework, the type of focus to which the
Internet is especially suited. I have often thought that groups with a more narrow
focus — e.g., H-UrbTransport, H-UrbHousing, H-UrbReligion — would be more dynamic
than H-Urban, because, at this level, historians begin to share more
interests. |
| Irish | Was your decision to create COMM-ORG in 1995 an effort to move in this direction? |
| Plotkin | In part, although I was also interested in testing a different model from H-Urban.
I established COMM-ORG — an on-line seminar on the history of community organizing
and community-based development — in November 1995, and served as editor through
December 1996. Funded by the University of Illinois at Chicago Great Cities program,
COMM-ORG was an online forum involving periodic presentations of working papers
and discussion on the history and practice of community organizing and/or
community-based development. It allowed me to examine the possibility of online
scholarly collaboration in the specific area of urban history that was closest to
my personal and professional experiences in Boston and the dissertation research
that evolved from that. |
| Irish | Why did you use this more formal approach? |
| Plotkin | Because of my frustration at the refusal of scholars to engage in substantive
discussions on H-Urban. I thought that, if papers were presented, this might
trigger discussion – and, even if it didn’t, there would at least be the outcome
of an online piece of scholarship. |
| Irish | Was this more successful? |
| Plotkin | Not really. Again, it was difficult to get leaders in the field to contribute
papers, for an obvious reason — COMM-ORG did not include peer-review prior to
publishing papers. Thus, there was no academic credit for preparing a paper to
post on COMM-ORG. We were lucky to get as many good papers as we did, from senior,
Internet-adept scholars who no longer had to worry about tenure and promotion;
junior scholars who appreciated the opportunity to post work that had been
rejected for formal publication; and academics in disciplines where publishing was
less important. |
| Irish | What happened to COMM-ORG? |
| Plotkin | Under the current able editorship of Randy Stoecker, who produced one of the best
papers during my period overseeing it, COMM-ORG continues to be a vital forum for
practitioners and scholars. For the most part, it focuses on current practices and
theory of community organizing, rather than its history.[16]
|
| Irish | Wendy, we have been looking backwards at events that occurred over ten years ago.
Since then, you have matured as a scholar and taught at a major university. How
has the passage of time affected your perspective on H-Urban? For instance, what
is the impact of newer technologies on H-Net and H-Urban? |
| | In June, the Chronicle of Higher Education published
an article entitled “Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists,
Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance.” It quoted T. Mills Kelly, the
associate director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason
University, and a former H-Net editor, as saying that the advent of blogging,
Twitter, and similar technologies is likely to make “e-mail lists…increasingly
irrelevant”
[Young 2009]. Do you agree with this assessment? |
| Plotkin | No, not at all. Mills was basing this assessment on his experience with those
lists in which he was involved. According to the Chronicle, Kelly noted that “one of
those lists shut down for lack of use in 2005, and the activity on the others
sputters along with little useful information.”
|
| | However, H-Urban’s experience has been virtually the opposite. Our subscriptions
are coming in at a faster pace than at any other time except in the initial years,
with a total of almost 2000 active subscribers from 48 countries. The United
States accounts for a high proportion of these — approximately three-quarters —
with Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands
next in order. Most of those joining seem to be younger faculty and graduate
students, with an increasing number coming from outside of the United States,
although H-Urban subscribers include many — although not all — of the leading
international urban historians. A cross-section of subscribers within the last
year includes an assistant professor of history at St. Olaf’s College in
Minnesota; a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Chicago; and an
assistant dean of a Maryland pharmacy college who works on environmental health
and historical epidemiology. |
| Irish | To what do you attribute this growth? |
| Plotkin | Largely, to the greater comfort of a new generation with the Internet, and the
availability of improved facilities for accessing it. However, two other factors
play a role, I believe: H-Urban’s reputation for quality, including posting
information that is considered to be relevant, and our outreach to new board
members from outside of the United States. |
| | However, H-Urban occasionally loses subscribers, which is always disappointing to
me — and it seems to be some of the older, more established scholars who choose
not to stay. I don’t think that this is a result of the medium, but because they
have less need for the announcements, calls for papers, book reviews, and syllabi
that comprise the major features of H-Urban. It’s not that this material is not of
a high quality, but that scholars can obtain this material from journals. |
| Irish | Do you still believe that there is a role for online discussion in the scholarly
world, or have you accepted the more traditional preference among historians to
record their findings primarily in books and articles? |
| Plotkin | I do believe that there is a role for online work, and I have not
accepted the traditional preference for books and articles at the cost of online
discussion. In fact, these years of teaching and research have led me to question
the scholarly forms and practices that evolved during the era of print. If one
examines these forms and practices closely, one sees that, to a great extent, they
arose because of the reliance on print. For example, the high cost of producing
and distributing scholarship made it more efficient (in terms of cost and time) to
package and deliver lengthy manuscripts and unrelated collections of articles and
book reviews at periodic intervals. |
| Irish | Haven’t historians continued to use these forms for intellectual reasons? |
| Plotkin | Yes and no. I think that, within history, the book form has persisted because
history has been considered a humanities discipline, and the art and craft of
writing is deemed a key part of historical production. Writing ability carries
greater weight among historians than among social scientists — a standard with
which I agree. |
| | In addition, this attitude has been buttressed by the growing belief in the late
20th century in the organic and subjective nature of
history. By “organic,” I mean the sense that most arguments are so complex
that they require a book-length document for their exposition — and that a
historian must display the skill to grapple with intertwining layers of evidence
and analysis over a specified chronological period to be able to reveal the past
in all its complexity. |
| | By “subjective,” I refer to the effects of the skepticism and linguistic
concerns that seeped into all academic disciplines in the 1960s and after. Within
history, these factors heightened the sense that authors’ worldviews
and assumptions were the engines that organized the strands of
evidence and analysis into unique configurations — and that historian’s books
were, in fact, an intricate mix of fact and interpretation that was as much art as
science. |
| | However, I believe that this outlook denies the degree to which good historical
monographs consist of debatable facts and ideas that can
be separated and evaluated individually and sequentially in online forums as well
as in the “manuscript” package. I am not saying that books should be
abolished, but that historians should begin to develop intermediate evaluative
processes in which the ideas and evidence within them are tested, before they are
packaged as articles and monographs. |
| | As for journals, the choice of publishing a group of articles and book reviews in
periodic issues is also a reflection of the economies of print. Except for the
occasional special issue, these typically combine articles on topics that have few
common themes or connections. Online journals have generally continued this
packaging of dissimilar materials. With the digital medium, I believe it makes
more sense to publish the articles singly, so that it is easier for the scholars
to save and organize them. |
| | There is also a need for a classification system that would tag all
books and articles, regardless of location or chronological period, in a
consistent manner. The classification systems currently in place do not cross
national boundaries, and were not created by urban scholars. Even in the digital
age, it is difficult for a researcher to find all of the relevant work on a topic
– and this process takes up a significant amount of time. If urbanists in a
variety of disciplines collaborated to create and maintain a classification system
that would encompass existing and new work, this would speed up that part of the
research process that involves identifying and retrieving relevant work on a given
topic across geographical and chronological lines. |
| Irish | Are your beliefs in this area tied to the latest of the projects in which you are
interested — the Historical Encyclopedia of
Urbanism? |
| Plotkin | Yes. The Encyclopedia — a collaborative, online,
historical encyclopedia of international urban studies and history — would provide
a central place for storing up-to-date knowledge on key concepts in urbanism, in a
manner that would promote comparative analysis. The idea for this emerged from my
experiences in teaching historical methods to undergraduates. I had always
encouraged students to use encyclopedias as a means of obtaining a concise summary
of the state of knowledge on a topic at the start of their research. However, when
I assigned the entry on “the city” in the Britannica
Online, I (and the students) were shocked at the Western bias in the
entry, with almost nothing on the cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This
led me to investigate the history of encyclopedias, including Encyclopedia Britannica, and to evaluate the importance of
encyclopedias, which many scholars dismiss as serious sources for scholarly
information. |
| | This dismissal is ironic, because, in recent years, encyclopedias on all topics
have proliferated, leading to what I have labeled “intellectual sprawl.” The
idea of an encyclopedia is to publish concise information about a topic so as to
provide a source for scholars who do not have the time to keep up with the
thousands of books and articles published each year. I consider this not only a
sound rationale for their creation, but one that is increasing in importance each
day, as the volume of information on any topic multiplies geometrically. |
| | However, the proliferation of encyclopedias defeats their ability to serve their
audiences, for it forces the reader to keep track of each new encyclopedia on the
topic of her interest. Print encyclopedias are expensive, and most individuals can
afford only one or two. And, in these days of the Internet, how likely is it that
either faculty or students will make a special trip to the library to consult an
encyclopedia? |
| Irish | How does the Historical Encyclopedia of Urbanism aim
to stop this proliferation? |
| Plotkin | By borrowing some of the lessons learned from Wikipedia. Wikipedia, in spite of
its commonly cited flaws, has shown how a single encyclopedia can become a
“standard” if it is easily accessible, current, and of an acceptable
quality. Accessibility comes from being online and freely available. Currency of
information is obtained through the involvement of groups of individuals in
updating it on an ongoing basis, rather than relying on a small number of
contributors chosen by an editor to update it once every five or six years, if
ever. Quality is secured by having the encyclopedia editors provide ongoing
oversight of information for terms of two to four years instead of taking on the
massive job of updating all knowledge in a field in one or two years. |
| Plotkin | Quality is certainly among the most important issues, and products such as
Wikipedia are always suspect on this score. However, I would argue that the
traditional model of creating encyclopedias also diminishes quality. The Encyclopedia aims to remedy the defects in both the
Wikipedia and traditional models. |
| Irish | You certainly don’t shy away from ambitious goals! How will this project promote
quality scholarship? |
| Plotkin | In the first place, the Encyclopedia would be
maintained by editors who are established scholars in the field. One of their
roles would be to ensure that all information in the encyclopedia is accurate, and
that the entry on any given topic is written in a coherent manner. |
| | In the second place, the Encyclopedia would not
rely on a single scholar to summarize the state-of-the-art knowledge on a given
topic, as do traditional encyclopedias. Rather, it invites scholars from across
the globe to incrementally suggest additions, subject to approval and editing by
the original author of the entry or one of the editors. I believe that this will
result in a higher quality of information than encyclopedias that require single
individuals or an occasional team to cover a broad expanse of information. |
| Plotkin | Even the best scholars are not aware of all developments in their area of
expertise, especially over time. The number of places to publish is expanding, and
it is difficult to keep up with new scholarly information on any
topic. The lack of incentives for spending time on encyclopedia entries also works
against quality, as encyclopedia entries have little weight in the promotional
standards that determine scholars’ advancement and salary. |
| | In addition, the reliance on print for many encyclopedias works as a deterrent
against frequent updates. The costs of issuing a new edition (editorial time,
printing, distribution) are so great that new editions are done at relatively long
intervals, if done at all. Thus, they quickly become out-of-date. |
| Irish | Does Wikipedia offer a model for updating an encyclopedia? |
| Plotkin | No — because of the need for quality assurance (in terms of content and writing),
something that Wikipedia does not yet offer. Citizendium, which dubs itself “a citizen’s compendium of everything,” is another project intended to
add quality standards to an online encyclopedia by attaching names to the
articles. The organizers select editors who are responsible for overseeing
additions. However, I don’t believe that Citizendium will be accepted among scholars in specific disciplines,
because its highest level decision-makers are not specialists in
their disciplines. |
| | Thus, I see the need for the Encyclopedia to develop
an editorial structure that draws on established scholars in urban history. To do
this, the editing of the Encyclopedia will have to
parallel the editing of scholarly journals, i.e, a continuous process. The senior
editors of the Encyclopedia would serve as long as
editors of scholarly journals, with occasional handovers to new editors,
consistent with the experience of scholarly journals. Of course, they will have to
be assisted by a comprehensive network of contributing editors who are specialists
in specific places, time periods, and topics. |
| Irish | It sounds as if the Encyclopedia could really help
reshape the field of urban history. What other innovations would this project
feature? |
| Plotkin | The most important — and the most daunting — is the design of an organizational
structure that will depart from the alphabetical organization favored by most
encyclopedias. Alphabetical organization, with all of its merits, defeats the
possibility of using the vast amount of knowledge collected in scholarly
encyclopedias for comparisons across time, place, and topic. |
| | Let’s take urban transportation, for example. We now have encyclopedias of
Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and New York City (in the U.S.) and Melbourne, in
Australia, along with any I’ve not listed here. In most of these, entries on urban
transportation are included in alphabetical order, and, unless there is a subject
index, there is no way to identify them. While a subject index is of real value,
its creation is somewhat arbitrary -- and the subject indexes of different
encyclopedias are likely to be different, again defeating easy comparisons. |
| | The goal for the Encyclopedia is to create a
structure of broad categories that will be used for each geographical region, so
that the historical development within that category can be easily compared to
that of other regions. These categories might include transportation, water, food,
energy, shelter, security, order, and creative expression, for example. We have
involved anthropologists in the design of this structure because they are most
familiar with doing broad comparisons over long stretches of time and places. |
| Irish | How is the Encyclopedia related to H-Urban? |
| Plotkin | I believe it is a better way to carry out the mission I had when I established
H-Urban of promoting international and interdisciplinary work. |
| Irish | H-Urban has been vitally important to me since I first joined in 1997: the
stimulating discussion threads, book reviews, and sharing across disciplinary
interests have broadened my research questions. A number of H-Urban editors and
readers are at small colleges in non-urban settings, or in a non-academic
professional setting, and I think the online support they get for their scholarly
interests is invaluable. |
| Plotkin | I agree. However, H-Urban, with its loose structure and lack of serious,
comparative discussion, does not succeed in taking the next step — integrating
scholarly content or ideas, either across space or time. Most historians address
fairly narrow topics, because of the time- intensive nature of historical
research. Without the availability of concise, easy-to-access, information on the
work of other historians, it is difficult to avoid the fragmentation of urban
history that has been so much lamented in the last thirty years. Indeed, this
fragmentation has increased because of the multiplication of journals relating to
urban history and studies, and the increased costs of acquiring journals from
other nations. |
| | When the Internet became available to scholars, others and I hoped that it would
serve to overcome this fragmentation. How to do this well, however, has eluded
H-Urban — and the international urban history community. Discussions on H-Urban
have not thrived because the rewards do not exist to encourage historians to
participate, nor to examine the scholarship on their topic in other geographic
areas. Pressures to publish in formal journals are too great — and most scholars
do not have the time to pursue broader scholarship, save for reading several
journals and attending conferences. While these traditional means of sharing our
research and our findings remain important, they still do not provide a coherent,
international and interdisciplinary framework within which to contextualize one’s
work. |
| | The use of Wikipedia by many of these scholars, in spite of the problems with
quality control, has demonstrated to me that scholars are hungry for a single,
easily accessible place to record and retrieve a large body of information. The
Encyclopedia offers the chance to create such a
place that would be used to summarize the state of the knowledge in urban history
on an ongoing basis, in a form that will facilitate comparisons, overcoming the
fragmentation of urban history that has marked the discipline until the
present. |
| Irish | What is your timeline on the Encyclopedia? |
| Plotkin | I hope to introduce discussion of it on H-Urban in May 2010, and, over the summer,
conduct research on similar attempts to provide on-line, extensible — and, if
available — structured encyclopedias. Hopefully, in the fall, I’ll be able to
submit a proposal to the NEH Digital Start-Up Grant program for funding to develop
a prototype in consultation with leading scholars of urbanism (e.g., history, art
and architectural history, anthropology, architecture, geography, literature,
sociology, urban planning, and urban studies). If funded, and if the Encyclopedia seems feasible as a concept that is
attractive enough to leading scholars to secure their involvement, at the end of
the grant period I’ll organize a team to apply for further funding to create a
foundational version — one that contains enough core knowledge to induce scholars
to augment the existing entries and propose new entries that expand the
geographical or chronological scope of the work. |
| Irish | Could you offer some parting thoughts on digitization of scholarly materials and
the democratization of history? |
| Plotkin | I am glad that you raised this, Sharon, because, up until this point, I have not
really demonstrated a direct connection between my work and community
informatics, in which a key value is the democratization of knowledge. However, I
do believe that they are indirectly connected. |
Let me focus first on the promise of the Internet for democratizing the
production of history. As a fairly traditional academic, I believe in the need for
historians to acquire a broad knowledge of history, the humanities, and the social
sciences, and to combine these with good analytical and writing skills. It takes
time and effort, as well as a good intellect, to acquire this foundation, and even
then, the historian’s skills improve over time.
| Irish | Speedy history is indeed about as good as fast food! |
| Plotkin | Exactly. However, in spite of this continuing reliance on an intellectual elite,
there is a need to expand the pool of those who join this select
group. That is because it is impossible to create a single, enduring, unchallenged
interpretation of history. The difficulty in preserving all evidence of human
existence, and the subjectivity inherent in collecting, organizing, and analyzing
this evidence, make this a pipe dream. For example, in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the majority of academic historians (almost all white males)
wrote primarily about elite politics, society, and culture. They deemed this the
only “knowledge” worthy of study, and overlooked the lives and activities of
non-elites — the middle and working classes; racial, ethnic, and religious
minorities; women; and children. It is no coincidence that the democratization of
the academy during the 1960s and 1970s, with increasing numbers of non-elites
entering the historical profession, led to an active interest in the study of
non-elites. |
| | Aside from the social change that expanded the pool of those who became
historians, the growth of technology has had a role in decreasing the importance
of wealth in undertaking what is often very costly historical research. For
example, some scholars have argued that the development of microfilm in the 1930s
reduced the costs of doing historical research. This made it possible for students
and junior scholars to undertake research that would have formerly required costly
travel to libraries and archives. In a similar vein, the creation of on-line
primary and secondary resources have reduced, although not eliminated, the need
for travel and reproduction. |
| Irish | Of course information technologies, whether in the form of microfilm or digital
archives, have changed the way that we do historical research. Different people
ask new and different questions, as you have pointed out. |
| Plotkin | Amen! The Internet has also enhanced the quality of good undergraduate education,
so that students at a state or community college now have access to some of the
same resources that formerly only the elite schools could afford. This
availability also allows individuals who were bored by history in their formal
education to renew their enthusiasm for the field, and for present day students
from K-12 to complement their formal education in a self-directed, interactive
manner. This also has the potential for bringing a wider audience, of a range of
ages and experience, into the discipline of history. |
| Irish | What about the effect of the Internet on those who don’t want to become
historians? |
| Plotkin | In some ways, this is even more important, because all of us are citizens, even if
we are not historians. One of the requirements for being a good citizen is being
well informed in history as well as current events. And this has not always been
easy in the past. Individuals have a variety of learning styles, but traditional
education has tended to rely on a single style, emphasizing lecture, reading, and
writing. The Internet offers not only an easier and
cheaper way to disseminate information, but also a greater variety
of methods of presenting it. |
| | The use of visuals enhances the understanding of history, as David Staley
discusses in his book [Staley 2002]. It is not, as some critics
argue, an anti-intellectual concession to the “visual” generation. The
integration of text, visuals, and hypertext can offer a less forbidding means of
learning history than in the past, making it available to many more individuals.
Online discussion forums such as H-Urban and COMM-ORG can answer questions that
students previously were discouraged from asking teachers. Overall, the Internet
has become part of the solution to making the study of history more appealing to
individuals from all walks of life and with various levels of formal
education. |
| | All of this is for the good, because, as I said above, knowledge of history is
essential to becoming an informed citizen. Whether it is learning about the
history of exclusionary zoning and redlining or reading the minutes of the
planning board of one’s town, the easy availability of this information can make
us all more engaged citizens. |
| Irish | Let me take this opportunity to thank you, Wendy, for your engaged scholarship and
incomparable dedication to urban history, online and off. |
| Plotkin | And let me thank you, Sharon, for the time and excellence you have contributed to
H-Urban and other scholarly enterprises. |
Notes
[1] In the late 1970s, the administration of President Jimmy
Carter provided funding to regional planning agencies under two initiatives —
the Areawide Housing Opportunity Program and the Regional Housing Mobility
Program — to promote fair and affordable housing in the nation’s metropolitan
regions. The goal of the program was to promote “deconcentration” of
racial minorities from the inner cities to the suburbs. My supervisor was a
former community organizer who was opposed to moving African-American residents
out of the inner city into the suburbs. While opening up the suburbs to African
Americans and other racial minorities was an admirable objective, in the
absence of similar initiatives to allow them to stay in improved neighborhoods
in the city, it looked a lot like the “Negro removal” of the urban renewal
programs of the 1950s, at a time when the energy crisis was encouraging white
gentrification. Staff from regional housing agencies around the country
convinced HUD to change the interpretation of the statutory language of the
Regional Housing Mobility Program so that, instead of encouraging movement from
their neighborhoods, the funds could be used to revitalize the neighborhoods.
Watching my supervisor’s participation in these negotiations with HUD, I
learned the importance of advocacy and personal contact in shaping how the
government implements (or does not implement) legislation, a lesson on the
informal processes that affect governance.
[2] The Boston Housing Partnership was an umbrella program to garner
resources and assist ten community development corporations in rehabilitating
and managing a total of 1000 units of multifamily housing in their
neighborhoods. The former director, Robert Whittlesey, is now the director of a
larger organization, the Housing Partnership Network (http://www.housingpartnership.net). The history of the Network is
described at http://www.housingpartnership.net/about_us/history/. [3] The CEED program no longer exists.
[4]
Urban Planning Aid, Less Rent, More Control: A Tenants
Guide to Rent Control in Massachusetts (Cambridge: Urban Planning
Aid, 1972).
[5] Emily Achtenberg and Michael Stone, Tenants
First! A Research and Organizing Guide to FHA Housing (Cambridge:
Urban Planning Aid, 1974) and Urban Planning Aid, How to
Use OSHA (Cambridge: Urban Planning Aid, 1975). The records of Urban
Planning Aid, which closed its doors in 1982, are at the University of
Massachusetts at Boston (described at http://www.lib.umb.edu/node/1645). Among those who have assessed
their work is Lily M. Hoffman, The Politics of Knowledge:
Activist Movements in Medicine and Planning (Albany: SUNY,
1986). [7] It did
this by creating a “mark-up” system that would characterize not only the
physical content of texts (e.g. title, body, headings), but also the
intellectual content (e.g. date, place, war). On the TEI, see http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml. [8] Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and
Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1971). In his review for the American Historical
Review, Lewis Gould described the work as “superub” and wrote, “Well
written and closely reasoned, The Winning of the
Midwest brilliantly combines the techniques of the social
scientist and the historian to produce a convincing narrative of
developments in the principal regional background of partisan conflict at
the end of the nineteenth century.” Lewis I. Gould, “New Perspectives on the Republican Party, 1877-1913,”
American Historical Review 77:4 (Oct., 1972),
1074-1082. Quote on 1076-77. Jensen is routinely included as one of the
pioneers of the “ethnocultural” school in the historical literature; see,
for example, “The Invention of the Ethnocultural
Interpretation,”
American Historical Review 99:2 (April, 1994),
453-477, especially 460-463.
[9] For the evolution in Jensen’s thoughts on the qualitative
uses of the computer among historians, see Richard Jensen, “Historians and Computers: Word Processing,”
OAH Newsletter (1983), 11:2, 15-16; Richard
Jensen, “The Hand Writing on the Screen,”
Historical Methods 20:1 (Winter, 1987), 35-45; and
Richard Jensen, “Text Management” (Review), Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22:4 (Spring,
1992), 711-722.
[11]
The Internet emerged from systems developed by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), within the Department of Defense starting in the
1960s. These systems were initially set up to allow scientists to exchange
large electronic files, but the convenience of exchanging short messages was
discovered immediately. The initial civilian system — ARPANET — sent its
first message in 1969, but much work remained to develop the physical and
systems infrastructure to embrace an entire nation. See Barry M. Leiner et
al., “All About the Internet: History of the
Internet,” at http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml.
For the most part, humanities scholars did not begin to use these systems
until the mid-1980s, a decade before the term Internet was
adopted for what was, by then, far more seamless and user-friendly than in
its early days. Textbook publishers were among the earliest funders of
humanities networks, hoping to obtain better information for planning
purposes. Among academicians, classicists and literary/linguistic scholars
were among the first to use this new tool for group communication, with the
creation of Humanist and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR, which only
distributed book reviews). In 1985, the “Whole Earth
‘Lectronic Link” (WELL) brought together “authors, programmers, journalists,
activists and other creative people” to communicate online (http://www.well.com/). At the same
time,Professor Lynn Nelson at Kansas State University and others started the
first history discussion lists, including Mediev-L, History-L, and HAPSBURG.
These lists, while containing some valuable content, did not screen messages
or limit their subscriptions to scholars, and were liable to more casual use
by amateur historians. For early articles about the Internet and history
discussion groups, see Richard W. Slatta, “Historians
and Telecommunications,”
History Microcomputer Review 2:2 (Fall 1986):
25–34; David R. Campbell, “The New History Net,”
History Microcomputer Review 3:2 (Fall 1987):
25; and Norman R. Coombs, “History by
Teleconference,”
History Microcomputer Review 4:1 (Spring 1988):
37–40.
[12] Among the pieces attacking the type of gatekeeping
practiced by H-Net, see Jesse Lemisch, “The First Amendment
is Under Attack in Cyberspace,”
Chronicle of Higher Education, 41:19, January 20,
1995, A56. For a more recent discussion of the topic, see Thomas W. Zeiler,
“Is Democracy a Good Thing?”
OAH Council of Chairs Newsletter 34 (November
2006), at http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2006nov/zeiler.html. On the debate over
requiring authors of posters to identify themselves, see Lisa Guernsey, “Scholars Debate the Pros and Cons of Anonymity in Internet
Discussions,”
Chronicle of Higher Education, 43:6, October 4,
1996, A23-24. See Melvin E. Page, “Editing an H-Net
Discussion List,”
OAH Newsletter 52 (August 1996), at http://www.h-net.org/about/press/oah/page.html for a thoughtful
overview of the stylistic issues associated with H-Net editing. [14] An early description of H-Net’s website is
Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, “The H-Net Website: Designing
OnLine Resources for Scholars and Teachers,”
OAH Council of Chairs Newsletter, 52 (August
1996), at http://www.h-net.org/about/press/oah/web.html. On the H-Net Book
Review project, see Patricia Lee Denault, “The H-Net Review
Project,”
OAH Council of Chairs Newsletter 52 (August 1996),
at http://www.h-net.org/about/press/oah/essaybr.html. On H-Net’s
teaching rsources, see Sara Tucker and Robert Wheeler, “H-Net and the Classroom: H-Teach,”
OAH Council of Chairs Newsletter 52 (August 1996),
at http://www.h-net.org/about/press/oah/teach.html. [15] Clay McShane is a professor at Northeastern University, and a
historian of urban technology, with landmark books Down
the Asphalt Path: American Cities and the Automobile (Columbia,
1994) and The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the
Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University, 2007). Roger Biles is
a professor at Illinois State University, and the author of numerous books,
including Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race, and the
Governing of Chicago (Northern Illinois University, 1995) and Crusading Liberal: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois
(Northern Illinois University Press, 2002).
[17] See “Wikiality,” Stephen Colbert’s satirical monologue on
Wikipedia, at http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=72347.
There is a growing scholarly literature on Wikipedia; among the most thoughtful
by a historian, see Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open
Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,”
Journal of American History 93:1 (June, 2006),
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