DHSTweb.org

This site (http://www.dhstweb.org ) is provided by the Division of History of Science and Technology (DHST) of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science. It aims to improve communications and cooperation among historians of science and technology worldwide through Web 2.0 tools (such as Personal Pages, Blogs, Tags, Wikis, Podcasts, etc). It is mainly, but not exclusively, based on Google Applications for Your Domain.

The new DHST site still provides information on the Division's activities but its success will largely depend on an active role played by the community of historians. The success of this “experimental” site might foster the transformation of the Division into an organization with both national (today about sixty) and individual members (today not in the statutes).

This site can be read by everybody interested in History of Science and Technology worldwide. To use the interactive possibilities offered by Web 2.0 tools, which will be progressively added, historians of science (professional, students, amateurs) need to register.

In order to register send an email with your data to info@dhstweb.org. According to disponibility you will get an email account (like: j.smith@dhstweb.org) and a password (provided to DHST by Google Applications for Your Domain) that will let you have access to a number of tools [from number 4 on tools are not provided by Google Applications for Your Domain but can be accessed opening a Google account with your "j.smith"@dhstweb.org user name and password (you do not need another Gmail account]. Registration is free. The tools already implemented or that will progressively be implemented are:

1. Email: 2 Gbytes of disk space for your mail. It works like Gmail, and allows to easily use the list of contacts of all other members. Of course it is possible to readdress the incoming mail to your main account (or viceversa!).
   
2. Voip through Talk (chat, talk and exchange files with other members). You need to download the free software, make yourself “available”, invite a contact to accept your calls. Moreover utilizing Skype you can have a conference call (up to 9 users +host) and broadcast live (up to 100 users).
3. Calendars: manage a number of personal Calendars (compatible with Outlook and others), access the DHST Calendar (DHST and other HST events) and all the other public calendars.
4. Groups: access the DHST Groups (through Google Groups Beta), basically cooperation tools on specific topics. The Council and each Commission will have a Group. Groups endorsed by DHST can be added according to specific needs and will be moderated; in principle Groups discussions can be read by everybody, participation is allowed only to Group members (acceptance is under the responsibility of the moderator). Groups allow easy communication between group members (not necessarily through email!), easy uploading of files and (for the Group manager) publication of web pages (100 MBytes each group), publication of members own profiles (making it easier to identify colleagues with similar research interests). It is a basic tool to build and participate in a community without being submerged by email messages or having to join web sites for students (like Myspace or Facebook).
5. Blogs: DHSTweb members will be entitled to comment and/or post on the site Blog and on all the other DHST Blogs that will be published, allowing better interaction between members and DHST officials.
6. Web pages: publish easily your own web pages with Page Creator (with 100 MBytes of disk space to build your personal web site and upload your files).
7. Personalise your own home page with a number of “gadgets” that will let you control at a glance most of the tools discussed so far (and others).
8. News: Rss and Atom technology allow easy update of information (already widely adopted by the main news commercial sites that show the icon ). Information once selected is available through your own browser or special applications called readers (e.g.: Reader) or aggregators. It is possible for instance to receive the table of contents of the latest issue of the main HOST journals (a freely delivered “current contents”). We are working at making this available to all on the DHST website (here).
9. Tags: to informally generate internet taxonomies (folksonomies). If you classify web pages of interest, you can have at hands your bookmarks and share them with the community (social bookmarking). This would dramatically improve access to relevant HOST materials. Software is provided by Del.icio.us (Yahoo) and more recently by Notebook (Google).
10. Wikis: the extraordinary success of Wikipedia has publicised the possibility of collaborative authoring through appropriate software programmes (or web sites) called wikis. DHSTweb members can start using Writely and Google Spreadsheets through their dhstweb.org account and password.
11. Podcasts: Basically a recorded video or audio file that can be downloaded and utilized asynchronously. A form of narrowcasting (“broadband/narrowcast, narrowband/broadcast”) “Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio or video programs, over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.” Could be very useful for spreading talks, interviews, lessons and for educational purposes.
    

Next steps:

1. Personalized Search
2. Search journals
3. Search books
4. Bibliographies through citation managers
5. Copyright issues and Creative Commons
6. Publish in the long tail
7. Movies
8. Catalogues
   

Project presented at the ESHS conference

On Friday September the 8th the DHSTWEB 2.0 project was presented in the morning with success at the 2nd ESHS Conference in Krakow. The DHST Council approved it in the afternoon. On Saturday the 9th a number of representatives of international and national societies decided to cooperate along the lines of the project.
To see the presentation click here.

Towards a new web site of the DHST: participatory media for a community of scholars. Possibilities and choices.

The digital world is witnessing and participating in a new revolution that goes by the name of “Web 2.0” and deals with “participatory media” and “social networking”; together with other relevant recent developments it can offer great opportunities for the international community of historians of science.

The phenomenal rapid increase in sites that allow easy communications and exchange of information between members (like MySpace, which has now reached 100 million users); the digitalisation of millions of printed books, images, movies, and music tracks that could within a decade cover the entirety of humankind’s cultural production; cooperative work with tools (like wikis) that have led to new instruments that are used by millions of users daily and compete with well established printed ones; the instruments of search and retrieve that enable finding (for instance using “tags”) documents previously lost in “the long tail”, lectures accessible to all (through podcasts), news available in real time (through “RSS”), pose new opportunities and new challenges and question our pleasant, traditional academic scientific routine.

Today historians of science usually work individually within strict boundaries, gather around small local societies, interact just through email or by expensively participating in conferences, publish in traditional media (books and journals), often with financial costs and giving away the copyright of their results. This is possibly not the best way to face universal shortage of funds, of academic positions, of good students.

As a small step to improve matters I propose that the new edition of our web site be based on these new tools (the present one has done a good job so far and has earned a reasonable page rank) and that an effort be made by the Division, but also by other societies, to utilise them. The site would be accessible to individual members and supervised by the Division’s officials. The guiding principles could be those of Open Access (Berlin declaration on the availability of documents online), Open Source (software), Creative commons (a more liberal approach to copyright).

The new Web site should integrate the existing potential for searching (the web, the site, the desktop, also utilizing clusters; books, scientific journals, libraries, catalogues, images, movies, blogs, wikis, podcasts, tags), for publishing on the web (working papers, preprints, books, bibliographies, catalogues, biographies, animations, simulations, documentaries, teaching materials, presentations), for receiving at will (not necessarily through email) news organised chronologically (scalable calendars) and geographically (interactive maps) (on current contents, conferences, publications, events, anniversaries, prizes, scholarships, grants), for establishing a community of individual members with the possibility to easily find, contact and work cooperatively with colleagues who share the same interests and fields of research (through profiles, groups, wikis, web mail, chat, talk (phone voip), videoconferencing) and to easily find and locate societies, research centers, university programmes, libraries, journals, archives, museums, exhibitions. The site should of course continue and improve the diffusion of information on the Division’s life and activities.

The standard home page will gradually offer all these possibilities, and the individual member will have the possibility to personalize her/his home page with the tools of choice. Given that most tools are scalable, a similar approach could be adopted by other societies and the result would be increased cooperation, greater visibility and scientific relevance.

A choice should be made between joining together different available public domain software programmes or utilising integrated tools freely downloaded from a major global company.