History,Historians,the WebHope GreenbergHST28716 December 2004Prof. ErgeneThe World Wide Web, as distinct from the Internet onto which it was launched, is now over ten years old. This would hardly seem old enough to make it a subject of history, regardless of the fact that quite a few "histories" of its development have been written. Yet in terms of the conceits of technological change and innovation, with their faithful adherence to Moore’s Law which posits that computing technology doubles in speed and capability every eighteen months, ten years might be considered several generations. If measured in terms of the amount of writing that has been generated about the web and its impact on society, the field is as broad as many in historical study. As computing and information technologies, including the web, continue to expand and to change they offer new opportunities for historians to redefine how we "do" history, to examine how its development is shaped by recent historiographical trends and ideas, and to help alter the course of how these technologies develop through our own use of them. These require a critical examination informed by an understanding of computing technologies, their creation, and adoption. Due to their rapidly changing nature, such an examination must necessarily be incomplete, but it is possible to draw out some of the overarching themes and ideas to provide insight into the intersections of current historicalthought and the web.The web did not spring, Venus-like, from the mind of computer scientists. Though there is enough overlap to make exact divisions inaccurate, it is useful to divide information technology developments, at least as far as they apply to the work of historians, into several eras. These eras are marked by the discourse surrounding the technology and by the actual technologies available. Two truisms have dominated the development of computers and their software: 1) software is developed in answer to a specific need and 2) that same software is often applied to different needs in ways that do not always work well. As their name implies, the early use of computers in history were as computing machines. In the 1960s and 1970s this function reflected and abetted the limitations of the technology and the generalinterests among historians with their growing interest in developing social history. This was marked by the collection and organization of enormous amounts of data, much of it in tabulated form, which seemed to fit well with the conception of computer as numericaldevice. Unfortunately, the limitations of computational analysis, indeed of quantitative methods in general, were quickly apparent. The mainframe and punch card generation of computers could only manipulate highly regularized data. The data available, despite the fact that it may have been collected on structured forms, was nonetheless collected using the highly editable, and massively unstructured, technology of paper and pen. Choosing the data to be analyzed and putting it into a regularized form required the kind of biased selection that postmodern, poststructuralist historians were learning to distrust.The introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s combined with the development of two major networks, the U.S Department of Defense-funded Internet andthe primarily academic BITnet (‘Because It’s Time’ Network) allowed attitudes, conceptions and discourse about the function of computers to shift. A computer that was available on one’s desk instead of hidden behind glass walls and locked doors, moreover, one which allowed access to be mediated through one’s own keyboard instead of through a stereotypically white-coated technician, and in which one’s own data, not the data of hundreds of others, was the sole contents, had a discernible impact on the scholarly community. The focus of computing changed from numbers to words, from counting to writing and reading, from calculations to communication.Once again the difficulties of applying a technology designed for a particular audience, inthis case business, was adapted and applied to an audience with rather different needs, academia. The shift was not free from anxiety and was often framed in terms of resistance. Writers argued the relative merits of composition in longhand and that using word processing. Teachers bemoaned a perceived shift in spelling ability as students began to rely on spell checkers. Books such as “The Macintosh is Not a Typewriter” appeared to help guide scholars through the transition from typewriter to word processor, while conversations about the use of computers in teaching filtered through academic conferences. An increasing number of these conversations were also to be found online asthe numbers of colleges and universities with e-mail and network access swelled. Arguments for and against the use of technology were framed in terms of “using technology for technology’s sake.”Several publications by and for historians published in the early 1990s made a conscious attempt to define the role of computers on the historians’ work and to legitimize that work. Janice Reiff, in her introduction to “Structuring the Past: The Use of Computers in History” places the genesis of that publication in the presentations and conversations of a 1984 conference of the American Historical Association’s Committee on Quantitative Research. The conference, titled “Quantification, Computers, and Teaching History” was ostensibly an occasion to discuss the possibilities and limitations of using quantitative techniques. Reiff notes, however, that the discussions included much broader applicationsof computing to the research and teaching of history, though she points out the skepticismexpressed by participants that computers could and would have much of an impact on either. The book, published in 1991, provides an overview of the computing models that were ofgreatest importance to historians at that time. Analyzing quantitative data was still an important part of computing, but had become only one of several uses. Reiff gives priority of place to computers as tools of research. Given the central role of research in the academic historian’s craft, this was a wise choice: by claiming this broad central ground as a site appropriate for computing, Reiff attempted to make a case for their universal adoption by historians. Her examples, like many who write about specific computing