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Techniques from History

Thomas Haigh@ThomasHaigh

www.tomandmaria.com/tomAssociate Professor of Information Studies,

U. of Wisconsin--Milwaukee

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About Me• Diverse disciplinary identities

– B.Sc. & M.Eng in Computer Science (Manchester)– Ph.D. in History & Sociology of Science (Penn)– School of Information Studies, U. of Wisconsin—Milwaukee

• Main research area is social/business/labour history of corporate IT work & institutions– Also history of data base systems, word processing, software

industry, web search, web browsers, personal computer, science fiction, open source software and (non-historical) obsessive frequent fliers.

– Chair of SHOT SIGCIS– Biographies editor of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

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Structure of SessionPresentation (45 minutes)1. What Is History?– Core historical questions & perspectives– Relevant historical areas & approaches

2. History & Information Science– “Information History” and its constituents– Internalist vs. externalist approaches

3. Integrating History into Information Science Research– Challenges & Opportunities– Exercise to start thinking about this for your own research

Workshop task (15 minutes)Start the task in this session, complete in lunch break, feedback at 15:00 in

afternoon tea break

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1: WHAT IS HISTORY?

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The Historical Approach

• Definition: History is the study of change over time.– What changes?– What doesn’t?– Why?– How?– For Whom?

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Why am I me, and why not you?Why am I here, and why not there?…..How can it be that I, who I am,didn’t exist before I came to be,and that, someday, I, who I am,will no longer be who I am?

Song of ChildhoodBy Peter Handke, from Wings of Desire

We Are Made of Stories

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History is Integrative and Interdisciplinary

• History explains why things are as they are, and not otherwise

• Disciplines tend to fragment perspectives (within & without)– History can integrate perspectives

• Bad history is everywhere– Historical claims as “straw man” for new approach– Usually they’re gratuitously ill-informed– This leads to some dumb decisions

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Historians Like

• Writing books – Book is primary unit of scholarship– Dissertation is a draft book. 2 for tenure.

• Telling stories– Emphasis on craft, not science– Method is for footnotes, “historiography” article, or

not at all– No literature review, research question, or method

sections at start of papers• This is either implicit or in footnotes

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How Historians are Different• Don’t claim/pretend to be scientific– Talk of “craft” rather than method– Quantitative approaches our of fashion

• Archival work is favored. – Every statement must be supported.

• The 1950s are unusually recent.• Work as individuals, set own agendas– grants & collaboration rare

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Presentism (a bad thing)

• Past viewed through lens of present– aka Whig History

• Reconstruction of past actions in light of current paradigm– Implies that what people thought they were doing is

not what they were really doing, thus– devalues and ignores ideas that did not take hold.

• Professional historians hate this!– They prefer to ground in earlier events, not later;– also to tie to broader social/intellectual developments,

and– explore the “paths not taken”.

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Relevant Historical Subfields• Each with own journals, conferences, specialized

graduate programs, etc. • Science, Technology and Society– History of Technology– History of Science

• General Historical Specialties– Social/Labor History– Business History (overlaps with business school)– Economic History (overlaps with economics)

• Museums & Public History

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Different Historical Approaches

• Intellectual history– E.g. history of “faceted classification” concept

• Social history– E.g. role of libraries within working class “mechanics institutes”

• Cultural history– Changing depictions of libraries in popular culture

• Institutional history– E.g. history of the British Library or ASIS&T

• History of practice/labour– E.g. history of how cataloging was actually done

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Different kinds of sources

• Institutional archives– E.g. records of Association for Computing Machinery or IBM

• Census or survey records– E.g. “Current Population Survey” statics on IT workers

• Newspaper, magazine & newsletter reports– E.g. New York Times, Business Week

• Diaries & personal papers– E.g. John von Neumann papers at Library of Congress

• Technical documents– E.g. journal articles, technical reports, patents

• Oral history interviews– E.g. with Charles W. Bachman, conducted for the ACM.

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Archival Research

• Relies on documents having already been collected, processed & made available by an archive

• Historians generally travel in person– Request appropriate boxes with paper slips– Sit and read them in a reading room

• Fairly low tech– Finding aids are increasingly available online– Visits shortening now digital photography permitted in

archival reading rooms– Significant online archival collections are starting to

appear

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Oral History

• Interviews with people involved in topic– Traditionally a way to preserve ordinary people’s

experience– Can be used with “elite” figures as a supplement to

traditional historical sources• Conversation may be transcribed and added to

archive/online repository• Scope and format varies widely– Full career interviews tend to be 5 to 8 hours of tape

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2. HISTORY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE

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Balkanization of Identities

• History of Information Science– ASIS&T SIGHFIS

• Library History (institutional focus)– Library History Roundtable– Library History -> Library & Information History– Libraries & Culture -> Libraries & the Cultural Record– Professional historians absent in field (Black, 2006)

• Communications History• History of the Book• History of Computing/History of IT

– SHOT SIGCIS (www.sigcis.org)– IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

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Information History – A New Identity?

• Alastair Black – apparent coiner– Nice 2006 ARIST article– Recent books by Toni Weller

• Includes– History of libraries books, reading, publishing– History of “Information Disciplines”– History of Information Society– History of MIS, etc. etc. etc.

• More a perspective than a topic– Daunting scope, but can “place an information spin on particular

past events or topics” (Black, 2006)• Follows inevitably from shift to iSchools?

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Three Key Questions

1. Who writes Information History?2. Who do they write it for?3. Why do they write it?

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Lessons From Other Fields

• A similar pattern has been followed in– History of Science, History of Technology, History of

Computing, Business History, History of Medicine• This is

– Pioneers have avocational historical interest– Early work targeted within community– Gradual shift to younger scholars with Ph.D. training within a

historical discipline– Gradual shift in questions, methods, audience, journals

• Will information history remain an exception?– Alasdair Black called it “History without historians” in ARIST.

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Internalism vs. Externalism

• Important categories in history of science into 1980s– Externalism began in the 1930s as a Marxist

critique of the idea of science as operating outside societal influence

– Now rather quaint, but useful in this context• I have a chart….

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To Simplify SomewhatInternalist Externalist

Intellectual and technical history Social and cultural history

Framed with concepts from technical discipline

Framed with concepts from historical fields

Narrative of logical progress Narrative of historical contingency

Author from inside discipline Author from outside discipline

Deep understanding of technical material Variable understanding of technical material

Intended to be read within the discipline Intended to be read by historical specialists

(Old School)History and Philosophy of Science

Science Studies orHistory & Sociology of Science

Celebrates heritage & pioneers Questions and problematizes received assumptions

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Ex 1: Social & Political Influences on Innovation

• “Mutual shaping” of science/technology and society– Key question in science studies

• Are cultural values built into technological artifacts and systems?– Do these favor some social groups over others?

• Concepts/vocabulary such as– Technological closure– Social construction of technological systems

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Ex 2: History of Users and Use

• Trend toward looking at USERS not just INVENTORS and PRODUCERS of technology– Since 1980s in history of technology and science studies– Parallel to studies of information use?

• Key insights– Use is how technology has an influence– Users make their own meanings

• Rarely those anticipated by inventors

– Users select which innovations are successful• Issue for history of information science

– Scope of practices vs. recognition

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Ex 3: The Cold War and US Science

• Unique political environment of the late-1940s and 1950s gave rise to– Rhetoric of “pure” and “applied” research and the pipeline from

science to technology– Expectation of constantly expanding government funding for pure

science– Rapid development of computer technology

• Similar driving force behind establishment of “information science”– Some work by Colin Burke on intelligence aspects of Cold War– Less on Cold War as structural framework behind the entire

scientific and economic infrastructure

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Ex 4: Information as Actor’s Category

• Historians are wary of concepts such as– Freedom, progress, efficiency, etc– Claimed by different groups, change over time, so “actors

categories” rather than analytical ones– Look at their histories

• Information clearly fills a similar role– Rhetoric of “information age” etc.– Word adopted since 1950s by different groups, implicitly defined

in different ways to further their own interests– Terms like “information technology,” “information system” are

thus embedded in particular historical perspectives• What does the social history of information look like?

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3: INTEGRATING HISTORY INTO INFORMATION SCIENCE RESEARCH

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Can History go Mainstream?

• This was the topic of a panel organized at the 2011 ASIS&T meeting by Jenna Hartel, U. of Toronto

• Discussion inconclusive then– This workshop offers a great chance to address

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Hartel’s Key Propositions

1. History has long been marginal within information science

2. Information science is taking a social & cultural turn– At least within Information seeking behavior/use research

3. Therefore there has been a “recent breakthrough” of history into the mainstream of information science research– Part of broader research projects– Undertaken by people without history Ph.D.s

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Open Questions (1)

• How widespread is the social turn?– Is this the same as social informatics? – LIS vs iSchool

• Can history compete with more explicitly theoretical disciplines in legitimating a social turn?– Craft practice, aversion to explicit presentation of theory

and method– No claims to scientific status– Less highbrow than philosophy– Less professional-sounding than ethics

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Open Questions (2)

• How does this map onto the internalist/externalist divide?– Socially oriented history written within the

discipline by untrained historians• What place do historians have in iSchools?– Loss of traditional place of library history within

librarianship– Will a new kind of history find a new place?

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4: WORKSHOP TASK

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Application of techniques from history

1. Join 3 or 4 others in the workshop to create a group of 4 or 5 delegates.

2. Identify a member of the group who is actively engaged in a research project that could make use of one of the historical approaches outlined on slide 12.

3. Identify a research question of relevance to the project that might be answered through the deployment of (an) historical technique(s).

4. Suggest possible sources that might support this research.5. Fill the details in on the task form and pass this to Thomas by the

end of the lunch break at 13:45.6. Thomas will provide feedback on the ideas in the afternoon tea

break at 15:00.

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