Publishing online

Why do historians not publish more of their work on the internet?

 

The internet is nearly always described by lecturers as being unreliable and students are generally told to stay away from the likes of Wikipedia etc. However, I think if you know how to use the internet properly for research then there really is not any problem. Furthermore, with Wikipedia being such a highly maintained site, information that may be factually wrong is nearly always picked up on.

 

So why should historians be put off by putting their work on the internet? Perhaps the idea that a book holds more authority over a web site is still fairly rife amongst most scholars which puts academics off from publishing primarily on the internet. However, more and more is being added to the Internet everyday, just like musicians have started to make their music accessible to those online, books and documents are also being uploaded to the web. In 2007, the band Radiohead released their album, In Rainbows, as a digital download only available via the band's web site. Instead of paying a fixed price, people were prompted to pay whatever they wanted. It was the first major album whose price was determined by what the consumer wanted to pay, (and they didn't have to pay anything at all).

So why can't historians take a leaf out of their book, perhaps encourage the interested reader to pay what they like? There are many cases of scholars uploading their whole book/publication onto the internet to be viewed by the public. Dan Cohen is an associate professor at the George Mason University whose main focus is within digital humanities and the impact of new media and technology on all aspects of knowledge. An example of a scholar uploading their book for access to anyone is Cohen's Digital History: A guide to gathering, preserving,and presenting the past on the web.

photo credits: fanpop.com
http://www.ctculture.org/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=Digital%20History&blog_id=1&IncludeBlogs=1