Jamel Ostwald's Gateway to the Early Modern World Gateway Classes - GMU Research Email

A History Website Manifesto: A Call to Arms!

After reading and discussing with others the potential utility of the web to historical scholarship, I’ve been playing with the idea of getting some sort of early modern military history collaborative project going on the Web over the next several years. Tentatively titled EMWWeb (pronounced 'm web'), this Early Modern Warfare Web would encourage better communication among scholars researching military history in the early modern period. In my own research, collecting background information on historical actors (à la Dictionary of National Biography) and regiments (à la regimental histories like Richard Cannon) for my database is so time-consuming that I’m really annoyed that everyone who studies early modern warfare has to redo some of the same basic research over and over. If we pooled our resources, had a standardized format, and made the results available on the web, we could avoid duplication of effort and allow others to use the data and share their data as well. To see an excellent example of this consisting of quantitative data on early modern European finance, go to Richard Bonney's European State Finance Database at www.le.ac.uk/hi/bon/ESFDB/bapres.html. To see a recent New York Times article on how such a website works for the sciences, consult "Web Archive Opens a New Realm of Research" by James Glanz (May 1, 2001) at www.nytimes.com . The De Re Militari Society's website on medieval military history is a wonderful example of what this site could develop into; hopefully the two sites could collaborate on some things.

As an overarching theme, I’d like to stress COLLABORATION. I envision this potential website as an informal exchange of data and ideas rather than presentation of publication-quality research, since I think our field is sorely lacking in basic knowledge of the period - we need a Linnaeus or Mendeleyev before we can expect a Stephen Jay Gould or an E.O. Wilson. This emphasis on basic information could obviously change, depending on what the participants want. I have lots of ideas, but some that have jumped out at me as I’ve gone through the lengthy process of making my database are:

• CONTACTS: Some sort of contact list in which we would introduce ourselves, our research interests (present and future), more casual history-related interests, and give brief synopses of our publications (with the possibility of a discussion group similar to the H-NET listservs) - I'd even be willing to give each contributor some space for their own webpage for a short academic biography if there was a demand, or else we could make a link to their own website. This would allow new graduate students (and old) to see what people are working on, would facilitate contacts and perhaps even prevent the dreaded "I’ve been scooped" syndrome. See William Beik's site for new historians of early modern French history at http://www.emory.edu/HISTORY/BEIK/index.htm for an example (ours would preferably be searchable by topic). And imagine if we could actually plan research projects somehow: several independent corps marching along different geographical (or temporal) paths towards the same objective! Or is that too Napoleonic a metaphor? Perhaps we should instead envision ourselves as a swarm of German locusts, Hungarian hussars or Russian Cossacks descending upon the countryside, devouring all in our wake? But I digress...
• ARCHIVE RESEARCH: Posting information and links on the various archives available (possibly even developing a network of people who could copy/find specific documents for others, for a fee if necessary), suggestions on particular types of sources, paleographical issues (including scanned-in samples with transcriptions), etc. In the best of all possible worlds, perhaps general guides/catalogs/indexes to some of them (particularly those without published guides) could be OCRed or transcribed and put up on the site.
• CONFERENCES: Posting conference announcements – by and large most H-NET groups do this, but unfortunately they rely on the conference organizers to submit the Call for Papers/Announcement themselves. I have missed a couple conferences (in Europe mostly) because I never even heard about the conference until it was almost time for the meeting – perhaps people could let others know when they hear about a conference that might be of interest - even a list of interested panel topics on a "bulletin board" (also on the bio page). The contacts made might be useful when trying to put a panel together, or even when looking for contributors to edited works.
• HISTORY DISCUSSION: General theoretical discussions of different topics, e.g. what issues anyone would need to address when examining logistics no matter the time or place. I’ve had the idea of making such "cheat-sheet" FAQs for my own use on a number of commonly-recurring topics, i.e. generic but important questions to ask at any paper presentation on topic X. The more focused and structured the better, in order to avoid the sometimes flighty nature of many listserv discussions. We could even conduct occasional surveys on the historiography (Best 10 Works on Topic X) if this was of interest. Perhaps we could establish an H-NET listserv that might perform this feature, although it would be nice if they had specific keywords that you could search discussion logs by (not just you typing in a word or phrase), so you don't have to just guess what word everybody used to discuss topic X. This, by the way, is one of the things I'd like to do at this site: develop a widely-applicable keyword list that people could share, something akin to the Library of Congress classification system.
• RESEARCH DOCUMENTS: Putting digitized (OCRed), research-caliber sources up on the web (at first, somewhat-rare primary sources published in the 19^th century which shouldn’t be under copyright). There are several good sites with teaching sources (Date Stewart’s site at Hillsdale College and the Internet History Sourcebooks for example), but very few with research sources in their original languages on early modern military history, at least that I know of. For an excellent example of American history, see The Making of America (moa.umdl.umich.edu). It would be particularly advantageous if having these sources available on the web could decrease the amount of time spent in (sometimes distant) rare book collections, where reading hours are short and may compete with archival research time. In addition to availability, another key benefit of this would be that the research information would be digitized, so you could import it into a database for further use, or just search the website’s large number of sources very quickly for particular items. For example, I’ve been collecting accounts of sieges in order to analyze siege warfare throughout the early modern period (a very long-term project), and others might find my sources useful for their own research. I can't imagine that many would want to spend the time tagging their documents in SGML/XML, but if others want to, we could accommodate that as well. To be perhaps too ambitious, it would be ideal if these documents were actually coded by members, so that others could search for specific themes without having to go through the entire document. See Note-taking and Transcribing Documents for some thoughts on this.
• RESEARCH REFERENCES: Reference lists like regiments (name changes, country of origin and service, colonels, dates raised and disbanded), personalities (names, families, DOB/D, country of service, positions held), perhaps even base maps and organization charts, charts showing genealogical/patronage relationships, etc. As the inaugural example, Erik Lund has kindly allowed me to post an edited list of Austrian generals from the 1680's through the 1740's from his recent work War for the Everyday (click here). Lists dealing with broader topics (e.g. lists of combats, early modern wars including the shorter conflicts subsumed by larger umbrella names such as the Thirty Years War, etc.) could also be of use to graduate students studying for generals and even instructors teaching the topic.
• BIBLIOGRAPHY: (Annotated) bibliographies? periodic literature reviews and discussions? It would be nice if this section had some search function, rather than just a long list of works to skim through. It might be particularly helpful if people would volunteer to follow specific journals (and maybe even post the tables of contents?) and keep everyone else apprised of what they contain – I have yet to find an online bibliographic database that gives timely listings of scholarly journal articles. We could of course poll the participants to see if there are particular journals that we should look out for. I don't know whether it would be feasible, legal or even desirable to load other databases' records (e.g. Historical Abstracts) onto this site.
• METHODS DISCUSSION: Methodology tips, discussion, etc. In creating my database, I struggled in vain to find discussion on the mechanics of doing history – particularly how to take notes, how to organize them, and how to use computers to speed all this up. Click here for my thoughts on the process. This could be an area where people might ask specific questions, recommend particular software (even instruct others how to do certain things within a particular program) or argue the merits of various methods. To flog a dead horse, have I mentioned that I think it could be quite useful to develop a somewhat standardized system of keywords (something akin to the Library of Congress classification system)? It could reflect the generic FAQs mentioned above, and could be used by many people in their own research, as well as be applied to the online research documents. This would improve our coding of sources, as well as encourage us to look for additional topics that we hadn’t initially thought of, perhaps even encourage some degree of convergence in the field.
• Over the longer-term, I can see a big benefit coming from larger discussions of our various research interests with people studying related topics – the advantage of comparative history. These discussions might even take the format of a listserv, being emailed to participants so the website wouldn’t have to be checked so frequently. To give a personal example, discussing War of the Spanish Succession Flanders warfare with Derek Croxton and his research on German Thirty Years War warfare (including subjects that he hasn’t published on) has really highlighted differences between the two, making me rethink my concepts of what early modern siege warfare was, and how far I can generalize from my data (over-generalization being the bane of historians). Obviously we can do some of this by reading the literature and talking/writing/emailing with colleagues directly, but expanding it to the web has several benefits:
• It has the interactive element of (hopefully) many people talking with each other in order to clarify/expand ideas, over a longer period of time and over a wider geographic spread than is possible with occasional meetings or conferences. Points made in a personal correspondence might be worth telling others, and you could even get credit for your ideas if enough people know about it.
• It is historical, in the sense that old discussions may still have relevance and will be found as easily as the most recent thread (unlike most conference discussions) .
• It alleviates one of the biggest problems I see with the status quo: losing people’s knowledge (e.g. reference lists) and their ideas because for whatever reason they don’t publish a finished work in a refereed publication, or even worse, they don’t publish the sometimes painstakingly-collected data that their conclusions are based upon. For those with heavy teaching loads, those who don’t have money or time to do all the research, and even those who have been drummed out of academia, they could still contribute ideas, comments, and documents. For those who wish to expand on ideas they’ve briefly covered elsewhere, want to present their embryonic ideas to knowledgeable peers, or present material that had to be cut out due to the publisher’s size constraints, this website would offer an audience (or at least centrally-located links to an author's own website). I would hope that journals would allow links from their own websites to ours.
• Related to the previous point, another big advantage is that by collaborating, we can somewhat overcome our language/period/place limitations – not so much in the sense of "I’ll translate this for you if you translate that for me" (which I suppose could happen) or detailed point-by-point refutation, but rather "You’d better be careful with your conclusion of X, because my research/feeling from my period/place suggests instead Y." You would thus be alerted to look for instances of Y where otherwise you might not have, which might save you additional research at a later stage, or even potential embarrassment after the work has been published. In a public forum such as this, you wouldn’t have to worry about someone stealing your idea since they wouldn’t have all the research data to back up your idea, and others would know you were the "originator" of the idea.
• One possible result might be that people could more easily focus on their particular topical interest across a much broader time/geographic range than would otherwise be practical.
• These kinds of "corrections" and opposing viewpoints are most useful if they’re done early, during the conception and research stages, where you can include new concepts or variables into your research, instead of having to go back to your old data later to look for this new issue you just read about in a rejoinder. It is also more useful at an early stage since it takes so long to publish anything that it’s hard to get a debate going without it becoming quite disjointed and losing its cohesion over several years, with different articles appearing in different journals and edited works which might be easily missed or only belatedly discovered.
• It might be particularly useful if people could keep track of the types of data that other people use for their topics and periods/places (using perhaps the keyword schema we'd develop), for future reference for either themselves or as an information exchange – along the lines of  "Anybody got a quote about using mortars in Spain?" or even "I’ll give you my list of citations on contributions in Flanders if you’ll give me your citations on siege journals in Spain."

I’ve talked informally with several other people on this (Michiel de Jong, Derek Croxton, Dave Stewart and John Stapleton among others), and there’s been interest expressed – actually Michiel encouraged my thoughts on this after telling me of a similar desire of his see an early modern website developed (see the Dutch Republic website he helped develop at http://home-4.worldonline.nl/~t845911/republic/ ).

Credit where Credit's Due

After getting enough participants (I don't think we'd need a large number of people for the website to be useful and there probably aren't hundreds of scholars interested in the topic anyway), one major issue would be to overcome people’s fear of having their ideas and data stolen or go unrecognized. I don’t know of any perfect solution, but there are several possibilities that I can think of offhand:

• People could put their data up on the site after they’ve published it. Most historians collect a lot of data that doesn’t get put into the final product, and sometimes it goes in appendices. By putting this data up on the web, you spare others from having to input it themselves, or even worse, having to re-research it. If enough interest was evidenced, we could eventually migrate the EMWWeb to its own (.org?) site.
• We’d obviously want to establish some ground rules that everybody could work with – suggestions are more than welcome. We should definitely insist that everyone who uses our website in their work cite it by name and give the URL in a footnote for specific ideas/data, and in the Acknowledgments section more generally. People could also put the URL in their bio blurbs and have links on the website to and from their own personal websites. Perhaps we could even make this a webring for participants? Is there an Early Modern (Military) History webring already? I know there are several on fortresses, Louis XIV, early modern England, etc. The De Re Militari Society seems quite developed, perhaps a model to which we early modernists should aspire?
• Many of the examples I’ve mentioned above (reference lists, background information on people or institutions or archives, bibliographic information) wouldn’t be giving away the heart of our research, so I don’t think people would be too protective about this kind of information, particularly if many people are contributing something.
• We could require membership to enter the more "proprietary" parts of the website if needed (passwords, randomly-assigned URL, etc.).
• If enough people participate they’ll catch any selfish people who steal without attribution – the more widely-known it becomes, the less likely it will be abused, particularly since peer-review means it might be another participant who is anonymously reviewing the plagiarist’s work. Our collective coverage of the literature would also be more likely to turn up plagiarism.
• In early modern military history at least, there don’t seem to be enough of us that there are a lot of people doing exactly the same period and place (one possible exception being the British Civil Wars), yet we can profit from other’s viewpoints since we are studying similar topics. Therefore the odds of someone stealing our idea would be less than in a more-crowded period/subgenre.
• As a last resort, we could take some mystic blood-oath, swear with musketballs in mouth and drums beating that we would hunt down and tie any transgressor to a besieged fortress’s palisades at the front of attack.

I’m not expecting participation in this to be reflected in hiring/tenure committee decisions (although it really should, see web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/Foyer/CompRecog.html for a sample manifesto on taking e-history into account), but it should make scholarship and teaching better for the participants, and we could certainly talk up the website so that others would check it out.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, including potential sources of support, I’d be glad to hear it. It’s quite possible that similar websites exist out there on the web (such as De Re Militari) – I’d be interested to hear about them, and we could certainly link to them in order to avoid duplication. I know of several regimental websites that provide some useful information. I’d appreciate it also if you’d point this page out to anyone you think might possibly be interested – professors, graduate students, archivists, genealogists, etc.

Last edited 10/22/2002