Surfing the Past: The Role of the Internet in the Future of the History of Economics

I have no intention of arguing that the Internet will save the history of economics as a discipline, that the teaching of the history of economics will be radically reformed by on-line resources, that print journals in the history of economic thought will disappear, or that Web connectivity will transform the interpretative work of the historian. Rather, the purpose of this essay is to explore realistically what opportunities and challenges the information technologies available through the Internet pose for scholarship in the history of economics in the near future.

Despite the fact that historians of economics have recently followed historians of science into the exploration of how scientific tools and technologies shape the history of the science, little attention has been given to the technologies used by historians of economics. I am sometimes told that it is fortunate I am a historian of economic thought: given my position in a liberal arts college, I would otherwise feel the lack of access to large libraries and databases, or to colleagues who can help me with new econometric techniques, or to research assistants, or to a constant stream of visiting speakers allowing me to keep abreast of the latest developments in my subfield. The underlying assumption is that, as a historian of economics, all I have to do is read and write.

Well, I do read, and I write. But the range of technologies available to assist me in the historian's craft has changed significantly in the last two decades. The new technologies have not only provided opportunities, but they are also restructuring and resituating my activity, changing the infrastructure that supports my scholarly activity, and reshaping my identity as an academic (see Golinski 1998). As almost every academic knows, these changes also come with a set of institutional, social, and political tensions that the academy is still working out.

This essay will be organized around the technologies available: e-mail lists; on-line text archives; archival resources on-line; on-line archives of abstracts and current research; the potential for on-line journals; and digital projects. At the end, the essay will consider some of the possibilities for the teaching of the history of economic thought. Throughout our consideration of the opportunities and challenges enabled by Internet technologies, the essay will include a look at the institutional issues around the provision of Internet technologies to historians of economics. Particular attention will be paid to the role of scholarly societies and independent journals and to the potential for collaborative efforts among historians of economics and other colleagues.

E-mail Lists

The infrastructure of academic life was transformed during the mid-1990s by the simplest form of Internet interactivity—e-mail. E-mail technology lowered the cost of communication among individuals, making near-constant communication possible. Scholars today routinely use e-mail to share preliminary drafts for critical commentary, and the process of editorial review by journal referees has been facilitated (somewhat) by the ability to send comments and files electronically.

Historians of economics have also benefited from the interactivity provided by the History of Economics Society (HES) e-mail list (see appendix for this and the other addresses of the Web sites mentioned in this essay). Regardless of what its creators or initial subscribers thought it would become, the list's primary function today is an extension of the individual historian's own research activity. Need to know the source of a quotation, the existence of an archive, or whether Keynes's predecessors said anything about liquidity preference? Rather than spending hours searching for the answers yourself, an inquiry on the list can often produce an answer within a few days and sometimes come up with a few surprises as well. The list's emphasis is apparent from the fact that 65...