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.