The History of Technology and the Technology of History:
Web-Mediated Scholarship on Recent Technologies

What happens to the history of technology when it is practiced by deploying its own technologies of investigation? The panelists sought to answer this question when they secured foundation support for Society and Technology in the Making or STIM, a collaborative project that uses web-based technology to conduct research on the development of recent technologies.

STIM principal investigators authored four discrete web sites devoted to case studies in the recent history of technology, while the Stanford University Libraries coordinated their efforts and developed a digital forum in which to conduct on-line research and collaborate across projects. The proposed panel will report on the results of this methodological experiment, and in the process raise questions about the role of technology in researching technology.

The STIM web sites were designed to experiment with the interactivity made possible by the web.
EV Online and the Blackout History Project use online surveys, newsgroups and chat rooms to elicit new source materials from a dispersed universe of electric car enthusiasts and New York blackout survivors, while the PCR and Mouse web sites provide a forum for pioneering scientists and engineers to discuss specific aspects of the revolutions their tight-knit communities experienced. Did this capacity to electronically contact study populations and direct their responses to specific historical controversies and source materials improve or change the panelists' approach to the study of technology?
Was the public display of digitized source materials and works in progress a prompt for greater insight and improved scholarly accuracy, or rather, did it merely present opportunities for respondent distraction and bias? In discussing the role of interactive mechanisms within their respective sites, the panelists will evaluate the usefulness of web-mediated interactivity as an extension of existing scholarly methods.

The recent and widespread adoption of hypertext as a medium for communication presents an exciting challenge for scholars, who have always used an older version of the same technology -- footnotes -- to report research findings and communicate with each other. Indeed, footnotes may be one of the defining technologies of the social sciences and humanities. The STIM team seeks to augment this approach by 1) adding multimedia materials to the universe of referenced source materials, and 2) collecting materials into a structured universe of linked documents whose easy mechanical cross-referencing allows greater precision and recursion than print-based references. Again, each site does this in a fashion appropriate to its subject: the Mouse site uses video modules tied to relevant materials in its archive to direct open-ended user navigation; the PCR site builds on the scholarly apparatus of scientific journals to structure scientists' recollections and commentary; EV Online uses an intensive vehicle owner survey in combination with selected archival materials to prompt discussion of the technology as it has been used at the grassroots; the Blackout site interweaves archival materials, scholarly essays, chronological narrative and respondent feedback. Have these HTML-based structures fundamentally altered the quality and substance of our scholarship? Does a networked environment facilitate collaboration across topical domains, thereby helping to allay the fragmentation of scholarly work on different technologies? What role do older materials and techniques -- paper documents, interviews, phone conversations -- play in buttressing STIM's approach? Is the adoption of this new technology, along with the social adaptations it requires, a problem in itself, with its own logic and limitations? All of these questions have shaped the approach of the four panelists toward their web-based experiments.

STIM's approach to web-mediated scholarship can also be extended to the proposed panel. Before the conference each site will create a special forum devoted to the panel, and suggestions and issues raised in these forums will be summarized and presented to the audience to initiate discussion. At the end of the panel discussion audience members will be asked to visit the sites after the conference and add their reflections, perhaps even contributing scholarly essays of their own. A recording and transcript of panel presentations, discussions and audience responses will be added to the relevant forums as well.

The issues raised by the STIM panel are relevant to the broader concerns of the history of technology. All four of the web sites present case studies which investigate pressing questions that guide today's scholarly debate; path dependence and lock-in, communities of innovation, the role of failure in shaping technology. Yet STIM is more than the sum of its parts. Web-mediated research, hypertextual presentation of multimedia materials, and networked collaboration combine to make our project an experiment in what may well be a new technology of investigation. We hope to engage scholars in a discussion about the promise of this new technology.