H-Net and the Republic of Letters:

New Models of Scholarly Communication

Dr. James P. Niessen

Librarian for History & Foreign Languages

Vice-President for Research & Publications, H-Net

Presentation at the International Booksellers and Librarians Centre

Frankfurt Book Fair, October 16, 1999

(revised May 2000)

This presentation is about a new environment for scholarly publication that is of great importance for subject specialist librarians for history, and also symptomatic of changes elsewhere in the publishing world and the library profession. My Web demonstration will give you an overview of the characteristic features of a very large Internet site. If I've stimulated your curiosity, please follow the URLs given here for a more thorough exploration on your own.

I want to speak not only about an information resource, but also about its creators and users. It is a very dynamic resource, and its constituent parts are the product of intellectual communities whose borders are less clearly defined than is typically the case with traditional publications. I should disclose that I'm an interested party in H-Net. As an historian specializing in East Central Europe I've been an editor since 1994 for the online community in H-Net that is focused on this region, slightly longer than I've been earning my bread as a librarian. For several years now, I've also been an officer of H-Net. As we say in American, this is "where I'm coming from."

What am I signifying with the title of this presentation?. H-Net is both an organization and a complex Internet site, whose core is a group of more than 100 mailing lists available at no expense to subscribers, managed by more than 400 editors and with more than 100,000 subscribers. H-Net's founder, Richard Jensen, liked to use the term "republic of letters" in reference to the organization. By that he meant to convey the sense of a collegial group of scholars who employ subject expertise and technology to cultivate their own elective affinities in defiance of institutional and geographic boundaries. Without using the phrase, it seems that Cicero anticipated the world citizenship of writers.[1] Jensen's meaning is rather different from the first usage of "republic of letters" documented in the Oxford English Dictionary for 1702 as the collectivity of literary writers, not scholars per se.[2] The narrator in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1747) remarked that some people considered learning to be a positive hindrance to fame in the republic of letters, although he himself thought learning was an aid to good writing. Still later, a character in Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveller (1824) asserted that "The republic of letters is the most factious and discordant of all republics, ancient and modern."[3] To these writers at least, the republic's reality fell far short of its ideal.

Another word that is important for our terms of reference is "periodical." It is first documented in the OED for 1716 and also originated in a literary context. It is interesting to trace through the somewhat later uses of "periodical" the notion that periodicity is a business model aiming at a broad, popular market rather than a group of colleagues.[4] This contrasts with the etymology of the scholarly journal as a less regular, but collective, form of correspondence for a more or less well defined audience: the Korrespondenzblatt, and Gelehrte Anzeigen. These publications are the ancestors of the historical journals that arose in the nineteenth century, typically under the auspices of scholarly societies.[5]

It also might not be completely clear what is meant by scholarly communication. The growing North American literature on this field tends to define it in terms of the ecology of scholarly production, especially as it relates to the formal system of publishing and the economics of research libraries. The impact of serials price inflation on library budgets, and consequently on the acquisition of books, is of equal interest to scientists who want the serials and humanists who want the books. Scholarly communication of course has its more intuitive sense, the informal exchange of information among scholars, that is the raison d'être for H-Net. But I'm also concerned about the place of H-Net in the broader information economy.

Richard J. Jensen is an historian of American politics who was a pioneer in the application of quantitative methods to this field, as evidenced by two books that he published in 1971.[6] The spread in the use of electronic mail among humanists and social scientists at the beginning of the 1990s was congenial to Jensen's facility with computers, his network of connections with colleagues in North America, and his gregarious nature. Historians could quickly and conveniently circulate research queries, calls for contributors to conference panels and anthologies, and news about conferences and other events to fellow specialists anywhere in the world who had access to an e-mail account.

At the beginning of 1993 Jensen founded the first three H-Net lists at his home institution, the University of Illinois-Chicago, in collaboration with a small group of his associates and graduate students: H-Urban, Holocaus [sic], and H-Women. Mailing lists had already spread widely enough by this time that one of their notable failings was evident: if all messages were distributed automatically without the intervention of a gatekeeper, a proliferation of irrelevant messages or noise often ensued. Without the intervention of a moderator, discussions tended to stray off track, and the ease and seeming anonymity of e-mail was conducive to emotional outbursts or flame wars: the "factious" republic of Washington Irving. Self-advertisement by assertive individuals, and the advertisement of commodities, also put unwelcome messages in subscribers' mailboxes. By contrast, every H-Net list recruited scholars to screen subscribers for their qualifications, and messages for relevance and propriety. The use of gatekeepers became a standard feature of H-Net mailing lists.

The expansion of H-Net was amazingly rapid. By the end of 1993 there were 21 lists, and by October 1994 there were 38 with 14,300 subscribers. All H-Net editors did their work for the network on a volunteer basis, pro bono: there was considerable enthusiasm and esprit de corps. But growth also brought a demand among the volunteer editors that the editors and Richard Jensen share the leadership of H-Net. In 1994 the editors drafted and approved a system of governance providing for an Executive Committee and officers to be chosen by all editors in an annual online election. To enhance the intellectual focus of the lists, editors began to organize the reviewing of books; to better serve the needs of younger scholars who were in many cases the electronic avant garde of the profession, they began to collect and distribute job announcements. The reviews and Job Guide became two of H-Net's most popular features, but raised increasing demands on the H-Net infrastructure. Processing books and job notices and establishing an online archive for the reviews and announcements were now necessary, in addition to the distribution of messages and the archiving of logs that the original host institution, the University of Illinois at Chicago, proved unable to support. In 1995 the Executive Committee voted to accept an offer by Michigan State University to host H-Net. After this decision was made, the mailing lists migrated to Michigan State servers with very little interruption of service.[7]

The choice of a new primary host in time produced a crisis of leadership within H-Net. Professor Jensen, the Executive Director, supported the decision to move to Michigan State but increasingly found himself in an anomalous situation. The chair of the Executive Committee, a younger historian named Mark Kornbluh, was at Michigan State and increasingly took over management of the growing staff and technical infrastructure. The replacement of H-Net's modest gopher by an increasingly sophisticated Web site compounded this development. Michigan State University provided considerable financial support (several hundred thousand dollars per year), with the benefits to itself of scholarly prestige and visibility and also the opportunity to enhance its prominence in African studies by special support for African networking projects. Frustrated by the erosion of his influence, Professor Jensen encouraged suspicion among the editors that Michigan State was using H-Net for its own purposes. These issues were fought out among the editors in the second election for Executive Director, in 1997. The election of Kornbluh as Jensen's successor ratified the changes in H-Net over the previous two years. The enactment of a new constitution and the election of a new president and three vice presidents in April-May 2000 also confirmed the relationship with Michigan State University. It also promised to broaden the participation of editors outside Michigan State and outside the USA in planning and policymaking.[8]

Let us turn now to an examination of the H-Net Web site. The home page is located at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/ . It has a standard menu bar at the top with these links to these information sources: news about H-Net, subject gateways to H-Net networks, about, logs, and contact us; then, below these, are the major categories of intellectual content: discussion networks, reviews, teaching, announcements, and job guide. The left side of the home page is dynamic, featuring links to the reviews most recently added to the H-Net Reviews page, while the rest of the home page briefly identifies H-Net and provides periodically updated information on its activities.

The logs are files displaying the complete record of messages posted by a list to its subscribers in the years since the launch of the list, organized by list and then by month; we will have more to say about these in a moment. Three other resources deserve special attention now because they are products of H-Net as a whole. The announcements feature is presented on a dynamic page of its own, with archives in six announcement categories, a search engine, continuously refreshed listings of conference reminders and upcoming deadlines, and link to a form for submitting new announcements. Announcements submitted to H-Net via e-mail or the Web form appear on the Web page and are also distributed to H-Net editors, who then decide independently whether to forward them to their subscribers. The Job Guide, similarly, has notices for university positions (primarily in history) submitted via e-mail or via a Web form that editors may choose to redistribute. The search function permits one to search by a combination of field of specialty, location of the position, and date of the announcement as well as whether the deadline has passed.

H-Net Reviews and the Job Guide are the most heavily visited features of the site. On one level, the reviews are produced much as reviews in scholarly print journals. The editors request review copies of books from publishers or receive the books unsolicited, then when the books are available the editors identify competent reviewers and supply them with the book if the reviewer is willing to write the review. In H-Net, publishers usually mail the books to Michigan State, which then mails the books to the reviewers on instructions from the editors. The electronic medium makes several distinctive features possible. The process of communication with the reviewer and the actual publication is accelerated, the lack of page limits means reviews are typically longer and address the arguments of the book more adequately, and initial publication on the H-Net lists enables reviewer, author, and interested specialists to discuss the work immediately. The central archive of reviews at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/ enables visitors to search and browse the more than 4000 reviews there by author, title, publisher, ISBN, Library of Congress Call Number or Subject Heading, year of publication, reviewer, publishing list, the date of the review, or words within the reviews. If they choose to do so, editors can insert the online discussions about a book to the bottom of the review.

H-Net's Internet site is a freely available resource that researchers and librarians consult regardless of whether they subscribe to an H-Net list. But the lists are the core of H-Net. The mission statement begins:

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine transforms a vision into an

organization. The vision is of creating and enhancing international, electronic

communication within communities of scholars, teachers, advanced students,

and related professionals and of facilitating the electronic transmission of

information by those committed to research, teaching, learning, public outreach, and

professional service in the humanities and social sciences.

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/about/mission.html

The lists or networks are of four major types: on thematic fields of history, on fields of history defined geographically, on fields defined by a combination of these, and for constituencies defined by a professional organization or type of work. Examples of the first are H-Urban, H-Women, H-War, and H-Environment; of the second, H-LatAm, H-German, H-Asia, and growing number of lists on individual US states. Holocaus (now H-Holocaust), H-SHGAPE, and H-SHEAR, and H-CivWar are examples of the third type, mostly on fields of US history. The fourth category includes H-Grad (history graduate students), H-Scholar (for scholars not employed in academia), and H-HistBibl, for history librarians. Each maintains its own list site, and all are linked from the list of lists at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/lists/ .

A common feature of nearly all the list sites is a link to the online collection of all discussion logs since the creation of the list, often several years with thousands of messages, sorted by month, date, and subject. List sites that are linked to discussion logs tend to have dynamic pages, with the most recent messages displaying on the list home page as a sampler of the list's most recent activity, and those publishing reviews also thread the most recent of these to their pages. Most lists are affiliated with scholarly or professional societies, and maintain or link to the pages of these societies, and all are required to have advisory boards that set list policy. Links to other Internet sites are also common on the list sites. Otherwise, there is tremendous variety in what is on the sites since they are the creation of their editors and, indirectly, of the online communities they embody. To intimate what these lists sites tell us about their virtual communities, I'll visit with you just three of them.

H-Women http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~women/ is currently the largest of the H-Net lists, with over 3000 subscribers interested in women's history, and also one of the most active ones. An examination of the H-Women logs indicates it commonly distributes more than ten messages to subscribers in a single day, and questions posted to the list often draw many responses back to the entire group. Requests for recommended student reading on a topic are very common. Because the group dynamic of such responses is so fruitful, the H-Women editors have also made them accessible by grouping them on a separate page where the visitor can browse the subjects under such broad categories as feminism, gender and identity, ethnicity and class, and sexuality. H-Women also has unusually large collections of syllabi (study plans and course materials) and bibliographies, generated by the interest of subscribers. The bibliographies rarely raise any claim to comprehensiveness, but have the attractive feature for working scholars that they respond to very focused questions. The titles in the bibliographies may be a simple list, but are often presented with the practical advice of colleagues about the usefulness of a work for one's research or how students responded to the use of a book in the classroom. Managing the distribution of messages and the compilation of material on the Web is time-consuming work. There are ten H-Women editors, most of whom take turns in managing the list traffic and others responsible primarily for reviews or the Web.

The HABSBURG list http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~habsweb/ is primarily defined by the history of its region, the lands between Switzerland and Russia formerly ruled by the Habsburg family and their successor states; it is limited chronologically to the period after 1500. Though not one of H-Net's original lists like H-Women, HABSBURG is quite old in terms of the Internet; the lack of an H- in front of the name is a reminder that it predates H-Net, having been founded in 1991. Most specialists in this field subscribe to the list, but it has grown more slowly than H-Women and its 850 subscribers are less active. The editorial style is also more discriminating, tending to exclude messages about current affairs or those without explicit relevance for the group's subject. HABSBURG has an outstanding collection of links for libraries, archives, and periodicals in the target region, and has digitized many primary materials as supplementary reading for students. HABSBURG has been more active than most lists in reviewing books, and has organized online forums on many of them that can be consulted in the discussion logs or underneath the reviews in the reviews directory. There have been forums on Czech and Slovak nationalism, historical antecedents of the war in Kosovo, and the significance of Jörg Haider in Austrian history.

H-Soz-u-Kult http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/ is the only H-Net list edited exclusively by German scholars and conducted in the German language. Formally, its thematic scope is cultural and social history but in practice it is broader. Founded in 1996, it had grown by May 2000 to 2700 subscribers. Like HABSBURG it is a relatively quiet, carefully edited list, although it has had an increasing number of research queries and responses. Notable features of H-Soz-u-Kult are the large quantity of bibliographic content: tables of contents of historical journals provided by their publishers and reviews of books and CD-ROMs. Most of H-Net's reviews of CD-ROMs have been on H-Soz-u-Kult. This reflects both an editorial decision (to provide reviewing of this medium that was lacking in other historical publications), and also the fact that scholarly CD-ROMs for purchase by individuals are far more widespread in Germany than in the US. In North America, different terms of Internet connectivity and telephone billing make access through Internet site licenses far more popular than in Europe. H-Soz-u-Kult has published a series of interviews with prominent German historians on the legacy of National Socialism in the profession. Finally, most data is provided through the Web server of the Historical Institute of Humboldt University in Berlin -- although, as with most lists, the initial distribution of messages runs through listserv at Michigan State and that is where the discussion logs reside.

Each list has its own discussion culture and disseminates different categories of material. These are determined in large part by editorial decisions, but also evolve through the dynamic interaction of editors, subscribers, and Web visitors. Each defines itself to a degree in opposition to the scholarly establishment embodied in senior university chairs, associations, and print journals. Scholars who are active in electronic networking tend to younger and, in the US, affiliated with institutions that are not the most wealthy ones. This is very evident in a comparison of the elected leadership of H-Net with that of the American Historical Association.

Within thematic fields among North American historians, however, H-Net subscribers are closer to the scholarly mainstream. While H-Net editors are advocates of the transformation of scholarship through electronic networking, individual subscribers tend to join a list in order to pursue their specialty more effectively. It is hard to generalize about subscribers of H-Soz-u-Kult since its thematic scope has become increasingly broad.

Internationalization is a special opportunity and challenge for H-Net. Both thematic and geographically-based lists have large numbers of subscribers living outside North America. "Foreign" contributors to discussions are encouraged and highly valued for the different insights they provide. There is a tendency for most subscribers to be Americans use the English language, however. Most Internet users are Americans, and English is the dominant language on the Internet. Foreign scholars seem to be reluctant to participate in discussions dominated by Americans, whether out of discomfort with their level of proficiency in English or a lack of familiarity with the terms and themes of American academic discussion. Many list editors encourage contributions in languages other than English, but only a few like H-LatAm and H-Japan are truly multilingual. H-Women has recruited an editor who is focused on international initiatives, and HABSBURG has added an Austrian editor who is based in Austria. The outcome of these initiatives is yet to be seen. Being in principle a German-only list, H-Soz-u-Kult has been more successful than any other list in establishing an alternative to American-dominated discourse.

A better metaphor for H-Net than the republic of letters may be a confederation of self-defining communities. To be sure, a handful of elected leaders of the organization provide the groundrules for collaboration, while the majority of editors are content to observe the groundrules in the sharing of listserv, Web, and redistributed messages. Now that H-Net has a constitution and by-laws, it is on the verge of incorporation and in a position to contract with commercial publishers for the distribution of its publications in exchange for needed income to support its activities. But almost all intellectual product is created within autonomous list communities with the facilitation of their editors. Employing different models, each one is making its contribution to the transformation of scholarly communication in its scholarly field and academic culture.

[1] Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta, especially paragraph 19. In Cicero, The Speeches, ed. By N.H. Watts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 29. I'm grateful to Professor Peder Christiansen for pointing out this anticipation of the modern concept.

[2] The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. 13, p. 673.

[3] Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. By Sheridan Baker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 478; Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller, in Bracebridge Hall; Tales of a Traveller; The Alhambra (New York: The Library of America, 1991), p. 495. I am grateful once again to Professor Pedersen for directing me to these passages.

[5]Margaret F. Stieg, The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1986), pp. 39-81.

[6] Richard J. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), and Jensen and Charles M. Dollar, Historian's Guide to Statistics: Quantitative Analysis and Historical Research (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971).

[7] For a brief history of H-Net in German, see Peter Helmberger and Rüdiger Hohls, "H-Soz-u-Kult: Eine Bilanz nach 3 Jahren," Historical Social Research: Historische Sozialforschung 24, 3 (1999), pp. 10-15. For an older, American perspective see Peter Knupfer, "H-Net: Its Past, Present, and Future" (August, 1996), http://www.h-net.msu.edu/about/press/oah/peter.html. This article appeared as part of a special issue on H-Net of the OAH Council of Chairs Newsletter, issue number 52.

[8] For the text of H-Net's new mission statement, constitution, and by-laws go to http://www.h-net.msu.edu/about/ .