The following links include individuals and organizations devoted to open access publishing (OA), articles discussing the pros and cons of OA, and directories of resources related to OA.

• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing.
• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
• Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals.
• Open Access Overview by Peter Suber.
• Directory of Open Access Journals.
• Open Archives Initiative.
• Open Access Webliography by Adrian K. Ho and Charles W. Bailey, Jr..
• Timeline of the Open Access Movement by Peter Suber.
• Public Knowledge Project: Publications.
• John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (2005).

Web 2.0

Ever since the term “Web 2.0” has emerged, debates have ensued over its meanings, implications, and relative usefulness. It’s been loved and hated, but certainly not ignored (at least by most of the web development community).

• Web 2.0 for Designers by Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter. Digital Web Magazine, May 4, 2005..
• What is Web 2.0? by Tim O’Reilly. September 30, 2005.
• del.icio.us/tag/Web2.0 – Results at del.icio.us for the tag “Web2.0”
• Web 2.0 by Paul Graham. November 2005.
• Web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman. A List Apart, January 16, 2006.

The Semantic Web

The following documents and websites provide discussions on the meanings and implications of the Semantic Web.

• Semantic Web. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
• SemanticWeb.org.
• W3C Semantic Web.
• James Hendler, Tim Berners-Lee, and Eric Miller. “Integrating Applicaitons on the Semantic Web” Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan 122 (10) October 2002: 676-680.
• Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. “The Semantic Web”. ScientificAmerican.com, May 2001.
• Edd Dumbill. The Semantic Web: A Primer. XML.com, November 1, 2000.

What is the Semantic Web? It’s essentially “a web of data” joined together by “ common formats” and coding to show how “data related to real world objects.” Tim Berners-Lee outlines the basic problem when he states that “one of the major obstacles” of the Web as “information space” is that “ most information on the Web is designed for human consumption” and not machine consumption. At present, a vast majority of electronic history scholarship, while freely accessible, are created for human-human consumption and not created with semantics in mind. My post on Semantic Markup and Microformats, for instance, addresses this issue in a specific way.

How, then, might the Semantic Web help with open access publishing? For me, the two work hand-in-hand. The Semantic Web is about making information meaningful and easier to find, while OA strives to give everyone access to the latest knowledge products. OA advocates the need to make scholarship more readily available to everyone. Semantics invariably aid in findability and usability. The Dublin Core Metadata intiative, for instance, “provides simple standards to facilitate the finding, sharing and management of information.” In the end, the Semantic Web helps to make OA possible.

Much of the work to provide semantic, open-access tools for academics is already underway. John Willinsky and others at the Public Knowledge Project provides Open Journal Systems. Open Journal Systems provides publishers with a open-source program to manage an electronic journal. Beyond scholarly pursuits, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses a flexible back-end that allows archivists to collect information from site visitors and uses Dublic Core metadata to organize and present archived objects. (See Sheila’s post, “Not the Same Old Archive”). I’m currently working on two projects that focus on scholarly and educational content management. Josh Greenberg and I are building what is tentatively called WordPress Courseware, a content management system for higher education courses that integrates blogging, dynamic syllabus and calendar creation, and bibliographic management into one package. I am also working on a simple platform to encourage academic self-publishing that combines blogging with the self-publication of articles. Both of these projects use the open-source, freely-available WordPress blogging system. Both also rest on the idea that our work as educators and researchers should be open and accessible.

The title of our presentation embodies the gist of my thoughts on digital history. We should move the past forward. We should be forward-thinkers about the past. It is no longer efficient put content on the web with the mentality that “if you build it, they will come.” We, as academics working for the public, should go to the public by making our work more usable in a variety of ways. We should enable our audiences to use our work in different contexts. Our work should adhere to web standards, semantics, and accessibity. Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, metadata standards, folksonomy, RSS involve thinking, not about how people can use information today, but how they can use it tomorrow and further into the future.

Anyone who has worked with HTML or XHTML has probably had, at some time or another, questions about how to mark up a specific piece of content. Especially when dealing with older documents that don’t always conform to modern publishing conventions. Even then, HTML and XHTML are significantly limited when it comes to marking up documents in meaningful ways.

One way that markup falls short with regard to academic publishing is the way that citations (footnotes or endnotes) are coded (or, in lots of cases, not coded). Take, as an example, a citation from an article in the open-access journal International Journal of Naval History:


<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%; word-spacing: 0; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><a name="_edn2"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></a><a href="#_ednref2" title>
        <div id="edn2">
          <p style="line-height: 150%; word-spacing: 0; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bookmark: _edn2" class="MsoEndnoteReference">[2]</span></font></a><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">
          See Gary Weir, <i>An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers,
          Scientists, and the Ocean Environment</i> (College Station, 2001),
          270-6; 334-5.</span><o:p>
          </o:p>
          </font>
        </div>


The Microsoft-specific markup aside, there is no markup indicating the different information included in a citation. A much cleaner, more semantically-coded footnote that would conform to microformat standards might look like this:


<ol class="footnotes">
  <li class="citation" id="edn2"><span class="author fn">See Gary Weir</span>, <span class="title">An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment</span> (<span class="location">College Station</span>, <span class="date year">2001</span), <span class="pages">270-6; 334-5.</span>
</li>
</ol>


I say “might” because there is no proposed microformat for scholarly citations. I chose my format for several reasons. First, it makes sense to mark up footnotes in an ordered list <ol> because that’s what it is: an ordered, sequential list. The number shows up automatically because ordered lists are, by default, displayed using numbered bullets. The “look and feel” of the citation can easily be changed (and should be changed) using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS. I mark up the author’s name, the book title, the publisher’s location, the date of publication, and the pages used by indicating a class attribute for each. This goes beyond simply using an <i> tag to italicize the book title. The <i> tag is merely presentational; It only italicizes the text, and you can italicize any text. But we want to do more than italicize the title. We want to indicate that it is, in fact, a title of a book. Moreover, we’ve indicated what text is the author’s name and other information, thus providing more meaning to what the text represents.

But why, you might ask, should this matter? Isn’t the fact that it looks at works alright the most important thing? My answer is emphatically, no, it does indeed matter. On an ever-growing web of information, where content is constantly competing with other content for the attention of user, where findability is currency, semantic, meaningful, human and machine-readable content will flourish. Semantic markup makes for better accessibility for all users, will make it easier for academic work to be converted and used in RSS and other XML-based tools, and will help create a uniform standard by which academics should publish scholarly work on the web. Take any 20 electronic journals on the web, and I’ll bet none of them use the same markup for citations.Using the markup in used above only slightly changes how the citation displays and works in a web browser. But my changes are more concerned with enabling people to take that content and use in in a myriad of contexts, “future-proofing” in effect so that we may use this citation in other applcations and display it in other ways. Standardization of scholarly citation on the web might, for instance, enable someone to create a tool that can search for how frequently a particular work is cited and aggregate a list of publications that cite a particular work. In an academic world where the influence of one’s scholarship is important, wouldn’t this be useful?

In a previous post I argued that the tools we use should be “invisible” in an effort to bring more emphasis on the content being presented. One way RSS can do that is allow readers of a journal to keep up-to-date about its recent publications without actually having to go to the site. Furthermore, it stressed the Web 2.0 mantra that “content is king” by giving readers a variety of options as to how they access and absorb the content from a journal.

Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter provide a good explanation for why RSS is an effective tool. In Web 2.0 for Designers, MacManus and Porter demonstrate that RSS encourages sites to adopt semantic markup, share content freely and easily, make sure that content (not ownership) is key, and give users more control over how they access content. For MacManus and Porter, Web 2.0 encompases six themes:

1. Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
2. Providing Web services (moving away from place)
3. Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
4. Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
5. Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
6. Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)

RSS is an essential component of Web 2.0, one that encourages more meaningful document structure and giving users the freedom to access content when and how they want.

A few subscription-based E-Journals do offer RSS feeds. All of Cambridge University Press’ Cambridge Journals Online offer RSS feeds. But because access to their journals is still subscription-based, the feeds only contain the titles of the latest articles in a particular journal. No full-text. No abstract. No summary. No keywords. While this is a step in the right direction, we need more, much bigger steps.

In contrast, imagine that lots of journals offer RSS feeds of their most recent articles (like most blogs), feeds for specific topics or keywords (like “segregation” “filth”, “print culture”, or “collecting”), or feeds for specific authors, historiographical schools, or any number of possibilities. All of these can then be imported seamlessly into a users feed reader and, by simply opening up that feed reader, the user can check to see if anything new has been published and can read those new publications instantly, without having to search for each, specific article.

This is entirely possible to accomplish now. Del.icio.us already offers RSS for specific tags, for specific users, and for specific tags by specific users. Here, in our presentation, you can subscribe to the entire presentation or to a specific author’s presentation (mine, for example). ou can also subscribe to an RSS feed of a particular tag that we’ve used. For instance, if you’re interested in reading all the posts on this site tagged “collaboration,” simply copy the RSS feed for that tag and subscribe to it in your feed reader of choice. The technology to accomplish this, to truly democratize history on the web, is readily available. We only need to make the effort to apply it.

The AAHC would do well to integrate RSS feeds into their own, freely available, online journal. Other journals, most especially those that are open-access, should make the effort to publish RSS feeds and disseminate their content to wider audiences. RSS feeds are primarily about access, about the public’s ability to subscribe to content and get regular, easy-to-obtain updates about recent publications. As an historian faced with the ever-increasing challenge of keeping up with the latest literature in our field, it makes good sense to me for academics to want a technology that makes that challenge a little easier.f

A while back, several bloggers discussed how blogs did not meet the rigorous criteria for serious scholarship, but almost everyone believed that the “blog as scholarship” was limited because of the medium. It’s quite true that the vast majority of academic blogging isn’t “serious” scholarship. Much of it is spontaneous, and consists of relatively short observations. But just because current academic blogging doesn’t qualify as serious scholarship in the eyes of many academics doesn’t mean that blogging can never be used in a scholarly capacity.

I believe there is a serious flaw in the logic that blogs inherently cannot be scholarly, a flaw that puts too much weight on the medium itself, and almost no weight on the actual content or arguments being published. The logic in this argument is that, because something is published in a blog, it can’t be “serious” scholarship.

Ironically (or perhaps not), to solve this problem, I believe that one goal proponents of digital history should strive towards is making the “digital” invisible. More specifically, I’m a strong supporter of putting history in a variety of media, and exploring the ways in which historical knowledge can be expanded and enhanced by that variety of media. David Staley’s arguments in Computers, Visualization, and History¹ and his subsequent examples adhere to a spirit of experimentation, but Staley also wants to make the content the primary focus, not the medium. Staley uses the medium to shed light on new ideas and propose new ways of looking a history, but it is the history that’s important. I think that too much attention is spent on the type of media being used, and too little attention is being spent on the actual enhancement of history content by that media. The reluctance of many history bloggers to even consider blogging as a scholarly activity is an example of our infatuation with, and mistaken preconceptions, about the media through which we present history. When thinking about using digital media for historical scholarship and research, we need to consider how the medium can help us ask new questions and posit new theses. For me, then, the “futures of digital history” is one in which “digital history” simply becomes “history.”

To me, changes in thinking are more open, and more encouraged, by the blog format. In this sense, blogging as a scholarly venture essentially makes that scholarship a “perpetual beta,” never fully complete, always open to additions, corrections, and input by readers and authors alike. The web as perpetual beta is a key tennant of Web 2.0. Instead of seeking to present complete, finished, discrete packages of web applications and services, Web 2.0 keeps those appliccations and services in a stage of continuous improvement, benefitting from the collaborative environment tha brings creator and user together. Likewise, historical scholarship and history in general has, in many ways, been in a “perpetual beta” as well, but its rarely thought of in those terms. Changes in historiographical trends reflect the seemingly endless ways in which history can be used and interpreted. Input by countless historians has made history a very collaborative effort, taken as a whole. Thus, I propose that the idea of history as perpetual beta is not so far-fetched, but is in fact part and parcel of the craft of history.

So, this presentation will always be in a state of perpetual beta. DBefore the conference, during it, and long after it, I hope this presentation evolves as I, my panel colleagues, and my readers inform the dialog that emerges here.

The panel on history blogging at the AHA brought up some good discussion about the utility of blogging for historians. One question in particular addressed the place blogging had in larger technological trends and chages. Much has actually been discussed about this in the web development world, especially with regard to the development of the much cited “Web 2.0″ movement. Here I outline a few of these developments and hint at what implications they have for historians pondering the changes taking place on the Web. This post is partly a response to issues raised in that panel, and to Stephanie’s recent post on “Re-envisioning History, New Media Style.”

I’ve advocated on several occassions that one way we as history bloggers can make our ventures more legitimate (for lack of better words) is to encourage people to look beyond the medium in which we publish (books, articles, blogs, what have you) and focus solely on the content. What’s really great about blogging (and about Web 2.0 in general) is that the focus is less on technology and more on state-of-mind and attitude. That includes the attitude that content is king, and that the content matters more than medium in which it is accessed. Web 2.0 is, as Tim O’Reilly states, more an approach and a mentality than any specific technology. It’s a mentality that widens networks, disrupts hierarchy and strict control of information, and embraces cooperation and collaboration.

Blogging, one Web 2.0 technology that replaces the static personal homepage, is one technology among several that promotes community-building, collaboration, and fast exchange of information. Historians are a particularly solitary creatures, preferring to work individually on project than work together. But blogging includes several technologies that make community-building and information exchange not only possible, but required. Permalinks, trackbacks, pingbacks, and RSS all create the means to create connections across cyberspace. Permalinks established the means to link directly to individual “posts”. Trackbacks and pingbacks made it possible, almost instantly, to see the people who have found your blog post and have written their own post in response to yours. Commenting on blog posts has allowed conversations to extend beyond blog posts into broader discussions. Finally, RSS feeds allow people to subscribe to a blog and access posts in a variety of ways decided by the users themselves.

Web 2.0 also seeks to change the way information is controlled. The Wiki and folksonomy in particular break down hierarchy and authority by providing relatively unlimited trust in users. Wikis allow anyone the ability to write and edit information, a virtual collaborative authoring environment. Folksonomy, or “tagging”, replaces taxonomic systems of ordering inforation (think of the early years of Yahoo!) by allowing users to “tag” inforation with keywords. “Instead of using a centralized form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information or data….” Folksonomy relies on users to decide what information gets tags, and what tags are associated with that information. For instance, TagCloud is a service that allows users to create or upload a blogroll, and then a tag cloud of common keywords from the contents in those blogs is generated instantly. While Wikis are collaborative authoring environments, folksonomy is a collaborative way to order information.

Another significant aspect of Web 2.0 is the idea that web applications and information are not products to be bought and sold but services to be shared and enhanced. Many Web 2.0 services, including GoogleMaps, Ning, Flickr, and del.icio.us are provided free of charge and rely heavily on users to improve upon and share developments in technology and information. Access to the GoogleMaps API, for example, has allowed CHNM to create a tool on the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank that generates a map tied to the site’s database. Put simply, “content is more important that its container.”

Blogging can also be seen as a service to be shared instead of product to market. History blogging has done much to bridge divides between academics and enthusiasts and blog authors have done so free of charge. Many feel an obligation to share their research and ideas with the public, while others benefit from the exchange of ideas that come with cross-linking and commenting by blog readership. In the opinion of open-access publishing advocates, scholarly work is in many instances a public services, often supported by public funds, and should share their research with the public. Blogging provides the perfect mechanism for accomplishing this. Ungated, unfettered, and easily accessible.

Is blogging just one step in a larger movement that historians can take in adopting the Web 2.0 attitude? Is it possible for historians to make use of other techologies and approaches? Is it possible for us to think of our publishing more as a “service”, free of charge and open to anyone who can connect to it? For blogging to truly have an impact on academia, it seems necessary that it encourage moves to embrace other technologies and mentalities inherent in the Web 2.0 world, technologies and approaches that break down barriers to access and redefine how information can be used. Blogging is just one tool in an entire world of technologies and services that make up Web 2.0. Historians can and should participate in these emerging technological trends.