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Web Review Essay

All of Tomorrow's Yesterdays:
History Journal Scholarship on the Web

Let’s start with a working assumption—committing history to the Web is not a natural act. To many in the field this is self-evident. Using an ephemeral medium like the Internet (or CD-ROM) is contrary to a deep commitment to the enduring value of the past represented by the solidity of  the printed volume and the library. While proponents of this view have lately lapsed into silence (or come over to the other side), it is useful to summon their memory to contest current pieties about electronic publication. In the absence of this vanquished foe, proponents of online history scholarship seem uncertain about what to do with success. Most of the major history journals are now online, and few seem interested in devoting much substantive thought to what has been achieved and where we go from here.[1] However, the need to review, assess, and defend the extension of history scholarship into the medium did not end because the entire project is no longer in doubt. If anything, recent experience indicates that more time, effort, and thought are required than the proponents of the medium ever imagined.[2]

Reviewing the literature by the proponents of electronic publication highlights the confusion posed by our lack of clarity in describing electronic scholarship. A significant part of the problem seems to be the use of Janet Murray’s fiction-based “additive” and “expressive” categories, which deforms our conceptualization and articulation of the needs of historical scholarship. This tends to bifurcate our thinking into disappointment with how little we have accomplished and an inchoate desire to do more with the medium.[3] We have reached a moment in which we can and should do a better job of differentiating the types of scholarship on the Web, and the function and value of each. This is essential as a means for building bridges to those who remain dubious about the merits of electronic scholarship, and for building better measures of where these articles stand within the medium and where the medium stands within the articles.[4]

As a starting point, I would propose four distinct categories of electronic journal article—the textual (articles that are pure reproductions of a print article), the supplemental (articles that use hyperlinks to other primary and secondary sources on the Web for illustrative purposes), the archival (articles for which the author has created or prepared supplementary materials for the medium, but again only for illustrative purposes), and the foundational (articles that are built “from the ground up” and fully integrate other electronic resources into their argument). The key in this taxonomy is the author—the amount of effort a scholar puts into transforming the article for the medium, and the interpretive guidance he or she provides the reader in assessing the linked materials.

Textual Scholarship Online

Most of the scholarship on the Web is purely textual—an article that appeared in print and has simply been converted to HTML for display and distribution on the Web (Figure 1). This material offers no hot links to a glossary of definitions; no icons promising a voice, music, or some snippet of video. Nevertheless, this is rich and substantive scholarship, which contributes to the greater storehouse of knowledge on the Web. Students of history with an interest in a particular topic (and access to these sites) can immerse themselves in some the best and latest scholarship in the discipline.

Both proponents and opponents of the medium tend to overlook the value of this material. Skeptics about the medium will talk about how pleasantly the sunlight dapples the printed page as they read their journal beneath a tree. When they want to confront online scholarship head-on, they can usually identify some horrendous mish-mash of shoddy text, broken links, and sluggish multimedia. At the same time, proponents of the Web tend to want to focus on the future potential of the medium for new and vibrant forms of scholarship, and in the process tend to ignore the value of the exceptional scholarship that is already available online.[5]

The real value of most of the material that has been published on the web is its contribution to a larger database of knowledge that allows wider and more immediate access to some of the best history being produced today. Readers with a substantive (but not academic) interest in history no longer have to wait years for developments in the historiography of a particular subject to be integrated into textbooks and the secondary literature. And few scholars with an academic interest can resist the added value of keyword searching and occasionally (regrettably) clearing off a few feet of shelf space.

Proponents of the Internet need to give this form of scholarship its due. I have seen quite a few senior (or, if you prefer, “old”) historians drawn into the Web by these simple translations of print scholarship—particularly the materials on J-STOR. As such, purely textual electronic scholarship is a crucial element in the legitimization of other forms of electronic publication, and shouldn’t be left out of the catalog of electronic scholarship.

Supplemental and Archival Scholarship

When proponents and skeptics talk about scholarship on the Internet, they typically cite one of the two types of formal electronic scholarship I would mark as either supplemental or archival. These articles take the form of hypertext, with links to other texts and multimedia, but these are only enhancements to their presentation, not a fundamentally new form of scholarship. This distinction between surface enhancements and fundamental changes builds on Janet Murray’s distinction between “additive” and “expressive.” However, while Murray’s notion points us toward these kinds of relationships, it fails to note a crucial distinction in the type of material at the other end of the relationship. The additive materials can either rest on top of the published article—as links to external materials—or beneath the article as a larger archive of primary documents and materials. As scholarship, these relationships take on two very different, and important, meanings.

The top-up kind of article is essentially a print article that has been translated to the web, but with some effort to add supplementary links to external data sources. This review serves as an example of this form. As the links in the text and the footnotes below demonstrate, these supplemental links allow for an added layer of value in the article providing more immediacy to the footnotes and added depth to the argument. However, as an interpretive act these links are no more than footnotes—they offer the readers a link, but no clear direction on whether or why the readers should follow that link, or what they should do and learn when they get there. While it does not diminish from the merits of the article, any new contribution to scholarship will be localized to the text itself.

In this, the supplemental and archival article are quite similar. An example of an archival article is Robert Darnton’s "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris" (Figure 2).[6] The multimedia component offers a number of interesting and useful materials that serve to enliven and enrich the text, but it makes little substantial impact on the argument (as indicated by the ease with which the text was transposed into print in the AHR and the New York Review of Books). Indeed, some of the most interesting and innovative aspects of the Web version of Darnton's article—an interactive map and sung versions of 18th-century French songs—are referred to only in passing in the text. While interesting and valuable as an addition to the storehouse of knowledge, this illustrative material only rests on the surface of the text, and makes no deeper impact on the scholarship. A sense of the interpretive distance between the added materials and the text is suggested within the text by the comment, “For extensive excerpts from the spy reports and a detailed mapping of the cafés on segments of the Plan Turgot, see the web version of this lecture.” More generally, the reader is never directed to take a moment to view an aspect of the map, or listen to one of the songs, with a particular interpretive point in mind.

Similarly, a review of recent articles in the Journal of Multimedia History demonstrates the same illustrative use of multimedia and images. While they serve to enliven the article and offer some additional materials for the readers' consideration, they are not integrated into the interpretive apparatus of the article. The integration of the materials is largely through the captions or other text external to the scholarly argument contained in the body of the article (Figure 3).  For instance, Gerald Butters’s essay “From Homestead to Lynch Mob: Portrayals of Black Masculinity in Oscar Micheaux’s “Within Our Gates, provides a number of movie clips which are a crucial element in his analysis, but he creates an interpretive argument that does not rely on the reader looking at the clips. Where he does a close reading of successive scenes, he feels compelled to provide a textual description of the crucial elements he has in mind—note for instance the sequential lists of scenes in part 2). Looking at the movie clip becomes optional and extraneous from the argument.

This is certainly not to imply that this is bad scholarship, only that the medium has not fundamentally changed the message. The authors' contributions to scholarship go beyond the written article and include further contributions to the body of primary source materials on the web. In that sense they have provided an added benefit to the profession by making further supplemental scholarship possible. At the same time, the text is more open than a standard journal article, as the readers can immediately do a bit of fact checking on the author and draw a few conclusions on their own. But the essential form of the journal is largely unchanged from print.

Foundational Scholarship

In contrast, there is a small but growing number of examples of scholarship that use the medium to truly transcend the kind of scholarship that can be contained on a printed page. Philip J. Ethington's "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" provides an ideal example (Figure 4).[7] Ethington neatly summarizes the broad scope of his article, noting that “this web site—composed of images (still, panoramic, moving, and sequential), maps, short essays (epistemological, bibliographic, methodological, and conceptual)—is written as a totality; the verbal text and other media are meant to be encountered as a whole. It is 'panoramic' in both a figurative and literal sense. It attempts a broad 'survey' of a vast metropolis, attempts also to provide deep knowledge about particular places, but frankly confronts all such attempts as exemplary of the intractable epistemological problems urban historians must encounter.”

The article is conceptualized from the ground up to take full advantage of the medium, weaving together text and narrative. At a number of points in the article, Ethington directs the reader to view a particular group of images with specific interpretive guidance. Note for instance the interpretive discussion around different historical images of Broadway (just after footnote 11). The reader is guided through the images, not simply pointed in the general direction of some supplemental materials. To fully understand the argument, the reader has to move back and forth from text to image and back again. As a result, the text cannot exist apart from the medium, and the medium thereby makes possible a new type of scholarship.

This places a new burden on the author, who is forced to confront the problem of situating the readers in a space where the text cannot be the only object of their attention. As a result, the issue of design surfaces in an entirely new way. The textual, supplemental, and archival articles typically take the same form as a print article, occasionally using paragraph numbers instead of page numbers as the navigational paradigm.  The text flows from left to right and beginning to end with only the screen and the links really distinguishing it from print. Ethington addresses the added requirements of the medium by keeping a thumbnail to the image in close proximity to its discussion in the text. The reader can immediately see where they are being directed to and given easy access to the material under discussion. Given the depth of the material that is being discussed, Ethington’s site also allows for a deeper exploration of the images. After the readers click on the thumbnail image, they are connected to an additional layer of interconnected images, which allows the readers to look at or manipulate the images for closer inspection. 

With additional examples in the field, new aspects of this type of scholarship will probably surface.  But for the moment it should suffice to note that history scholarship can make a more substantive use of the Internet. With a clearer notion of what scholarship on the web is, and what it ultimately can be, the profession can move forward with greater confidence and greater clarity about its place in the new medium.