Because I’ve received so many comments to my post about the future of H-Net, I wanted to take a few minutes to respond to them in detail. Rather than respond to each individually, I decided to pull out some of the main themes and respond to those.
1. Matthew Gilmore writes that there is no way that the internal discussion of the H-Net editors can be shared, since that would be a violation of the H-Net bylaws. So, I guess I’ll just have to rely on the few tidbits that have been passed my way to get a sense for what the editors of the various lists actually think. It’s too bad that these discussions are closed from the view of the general community–unlike blogs that are open to all who care to read them. Gilmore also makes the valid point that my About page didn’t actually have a link to my name–hence the belief that I was blogging anonymously. Point taken. The page has been updated.
2. Several of the comments I received argued that email lists are much more convenient–that the information one wants is simply dumped into one’s email inbox and is there for easy perusal–much easier than hunting for the same information on various websites, blogs, social networks, etc.
RSS feeds do the same thing. Just as I used to do rely on H-Net to provide me with conference announcements, reviews of books, and the commentary of colleagues, I now get all that same information from another source: Google Reader. I prefer Google Reader for several reasons, the most important being that it is so clearly segregated from my email inbox–an inbox that is flooded with messages from students, my Dean, campus security, our building manager, etc., etc. Having the communications I want to read from scholars aggregated, sorted into folders I create according to my personal interest, available at a click, and fully searchable works very well for me–and it keeps all that communication clear of my inbox–the inbox that I wrestle with every day just to keep it under 50 messages.
3. A couple of people with lots of H-Net experience at the senior level (Greg Downey and Kelly in Kansas) wrote to say that they saw both positive movement for change going on within H-Net–not abandoning email lists, but adding new ways of communicating. I didn’t say that email lists should be junked next month or even next year. But I did suggest that they were probably on their way out and so I hoped H-Net would consider what comes next when the email list is over. These comments suggest that there is more going on at H-Net than is apparent on their website. Downey mentions a conference in his comment. I’d love to hear a review of that event after it happens.
4. A couple of people (Downey, the History Enthusiast) raised the question of wikis as one of many possible forms of information exchange among scholars and others who participate in discussions like those that take place on H-Net and in scholarly blogs. I think we have only begun to scratch the surface of what wikis can do for us. I used a wiki in a graduate seminar this past semester and found it to be a very useful tool for my grad students to exchange information about what they’d read. For more on this issue, I’d refer you to Roy Rosenzweig’s essay Can History Be Open Source? that appeared in the Journal of American History last year.
These are just a few of the main lines of discussion that have emerged in the comments to the original post. Thanks to everyone who contributed and I would encourage others to do the same. I post all comments received as quickly as possible (I moderate the comments to prevent spamming) and make them all fully available to all who care to read them.
Finally, a quick note about the medium–blogs, that is. If the purpose of academic discourse is the circulation of knowledge, then just based on the experience of the past 72 hours, blogs make it possible to circulate a great deal of knowledge at a high rate of speed. Since I posted the original item on H-Net my blog has had 1,544 unique visitors (as of 10:00 am EST). For a fairly obscure topic–the future of scholarly email lists–that seems like a fair amount of knowledge circulation to me. I’d be curious to know how many H-Net lists have more than 1,500 members?
I am a little stunned about this post, and disagree , both on the data that you suggest, and on your general argument (and in regard to the stats, you would have done well just to write to H-Net to get some statistics not only on the “traffic” but also on the number of discussions they generate). While, of course, the traffic in some H-Grad listservs is going down, others lists continue to be very busy and are growing, and new lists emerge, both in terms of volume and in terms of discussions they generate.
H-Grad, a listserv for grad students, for example, which I am co-editing with eight other people, has over 2200 subscribers, is very busy, and often generates interesting discussions about a variety of topics, ranging from orals preparation to getting a PhD with a baby to pursuing a PhD as an older student. And the community that an email listserv provides (people now introduce themselves when they subscribe) seems to be a good forum, where people feel safe and welcome to contribute. H-Oralhistory (while I don’t know their number of subscribers, but you can find out easily) is another very busy listserv, as is H-Soz u Kult, which must have many thousands of subscribers.
I would make another argument: I feel that listservs provide a better environment for women than do many blogs, particularly those by individual men. The format of many (not all) blogs, not only discourages discussions, but is also somewhat unfriendly toward women. I think one of the reasons for that is that the person, who leaves the comment, is automatically in the defensive toward the “main” blogger, usually male, and, as in real life, the “main” blogger is often more invested in touting in his/her own horn than in generating interesting discussions. And I think it is not accidental that women are a lot more involved and active in listservs than in the blog world, since listservs provide a better environment for women, because an email contribution gives you a better and more equal footing for a discussion than the blog format. Which is one of the reasons why many blogs don’t usually generate good – or any — discussions, which really should make you wonder.
So, I feel if there should be an alternative way of an exchange forum, it should take gender and power issues into account and not just market “web 2.0” because the technology is available (for some). And, I look forward to a discussion on this blog (as well as on the H-Net listserv) about your post and might provide some additional “hard data” on the number of H-Net subscribers if others don’t do it. Cheers, Katja
Hi Katja:
Thanks for this comment. Unfortunately, H-Net doesn’t make these sorts of statistics available in a public way–annual report, on their website–or if they do, I couldn’t find them. Maybe this very public discussion of their traffic will encourage the H-Net Council to make those sorts of statistics public. I’d love to be able to do some research on the rise and decline of various H-Net communities and having all the data available would be a huge help–and certainly much easier than laboriously counting posts in the logs.
I’m particularly intrigued, however, by your point about the differences in male and female participation in various forms of online communication. Back when I was an editor of HABSBURG, this was an issue that troubled me a great deal, because so few of the women who were either (a) members of the list or (b) important scholars or rising grad students in our field ever wrote anything substantive on the list. Because H-Net doesn’t (or at least didn’t then) maintain data on the gender of list members, I actually went to the trouble of pulling the entire membership list and counting based upon names who was male and who was female (at least to the best of my estimation). What I found was that almost one-third of HABSBURG members were female. I then looked a one year’s worth of postings to the list and found that less than 10% of the substantive postings (reviews, scholarly debates, etc., as opposed to notices of conferences, apartments for rent in Prague, etc.) were by women.
So, I asked several female colleagues who were prominent scholars in Habsburg and East European studies why they thought there was so little participation by women on the list. I got three types of response to this very unscientific/unrepresentative survey:
1. Women get shouted down on the list by men who tend to take a much more aggressive tone in their email communication and after a while the women get fed up with the “maleness” of the discourse;
2. The topics raised on the list are more stereotypically male (military history, diplomatic history) and so most of the women involved with the list just aren’t interested enough to contribute and/or see the list as dominated by historians of those ilks;
3. Women in academia are just too busy to take part in what amounts to an optional venue of scholarly conversation–in addition to trying to make tenure, write books, write articles, do their research, and in many cases be parents as well, email lists are just one thing too many.
As an editor, I decided that I could only really deal with #2 of these issues and so tried sponsoring conversations on the list on other topics–material culture, for instance–that were explicitly not military of diplomatic history. Alas, these fell flat.
Given all this, I found your take on the male/female difference quite interesting and I’d love to see this explore more. Thanks again for writing.
PS: After I posted this comment, I remembered hearing at a conference that the largest category of blogger (generally, not in academia) was the so-called “Mommy Blogger” — women writing about their and their families’ lives. The presenter offered no statistics to back up this claim, it’s another interesting piece of this puzzle.
Factors other than medium can affect the success or failure of a forum. As Andrew Todd, Jonathan Dresner and others point out, there are fixes to some of the technical issues. Other barriers may be more difficult to overcome as they may be hard to discern in the first place or difficult to discuss. Not all relate to gender–I’m female but am interested in Presidential, diplomatic and military history. I once was an employee of the National Archives where I screened Richard Nixon’s tapes to see which portions could be opened for research by the public.
The slow pace of posting messages does inhibit H-Net “conversations” somewhat, as does the need to go through a moderator. I eventually dropped my subscription to one H-Net group (after subscribing for seven years) because I had submitted a message but was rebuffed when I wanted to post supplemental information a few days later. The reason given by the moderator for declining to post my follow-up message was that no one had replied to my earlier posting. It was not the first time that had happened.
A conservative approach by the moderator has the potential to shut the door to the sharing of information on some complicated topics. None of us is an expert on everything that affects the study of history. But some inter-disciplinary issues are so complicated that they may necessitate detailed, incremental postings by a subscriber over time.
If the moderator rejects follow-up messages by an initiator to a thread that appears quiet at the outset, the poster who initiated the thread is out of luck. Neither the moderator nor the poster is at fault (the moderator can’t guess where the poster is headed. But there may be factors that prevent the poster from taking a more direct approach).
A larger issue, both with Listservs and with blog owners (I’m looking beyond H-Net), is that an owner or moderator typically has subject matter expertise but sometimes lacks training in how to facilitate communication. Yet people have widely varying styles of communication, styles which can clash at times. (Linguist Deborah Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University, provides useful insights into this in her books, such as _Talking From 9 to 5_).
You see many different communications styles on display both in Listservs and in blog comments. Despite the power that a moderator or a blog owner has to move along or, perhaps inadvertently, squelch discussions, not everyone in such a position can recognize what is going on in terms of group dynamics.
Even when moderators or forum members or bloggers believe they do not seek groupthink or conformity, there may be barriers to discussion. In some forums self policing is effective, in others it is not. In the virtual world as in the workplace, it can take training in communication and some understanding of behavioral sciences–and most of all, the time to think through the issues, something many busy H-Net moderators probably lack–to counteract some of these barriers.
At any rate, there is plenty of data in e-forums, Lists and blogs alike, for the Dr. Tannens of the future to study.
Submitted on personal time by Smartphone
Mills,
many thanks for your response and for the interesting background information on the gender of Habsburg subscribers. So, maybe I am wrong about my assertion that women are more active on listservs than on blogs – maybe they are or were uncomfortable on listservs, too. Or more comfortable on blogs than I suggested. Obviously, it would be really interesting to go beyond impressions, explore this issue better, and get some statistics about who is using what kind of forum for what purpose and also in what way (as Maarja Krusten has suggested).
I do think, however, that the format of many one-person blogs (group blogs are somewhat different) encourages one-sided communication, whether from a male or female blogger, and discourages discussion. But, as other commentators have suggested, it is really not necessary to play out one form against the other. Instead, I’d rather look at what form of communication is useful for what purpose for whom – and from that perspective, email listservs and blogs don’t really exclude each other, but simply may serve different purposes and different communities. Best, Katja
A very interesting discussion, in the blog posts and all the comments.
If you read Professor Tannen’s books, you can see that male-female communication differences might play a role in workplace settings and perhaps in Internet forums, as well. Tannen believes that in some settings, men are much more aware than women of their relative roles. Tannen asserts that more so than women, men look at issues from the perspective of status, that is, are they in a one-up or one-down status in relation to others in the group. She claims they are more aware of hierarchy in a group and sometimes use put-downs as they jockey for position. She claims that women are more likely to focus on whether everyone’s voices are being heard.
I’m not a fan of stereotyping. I’ve certainly seen men (even on HNN) who seem welcoming of diverse opinions, thank other posters for pointing out something they didn’t know and don’t seem at all threatened by others in the group. And I’ve seen women who appear snarky when others in the group post opposing views or correct their errors.
So I don’t entirely buy what Tannen asserts although there may be something to it. I think there are plenty of men and women with sufficient confidence in themselves to go with the flow in Listserv and blog debates. I think most people are fine trading off, at times being the one educating others, at times learning from others. However, in one email Listsserv, I have to say that some time ago, I observed what once did feel like a “king of the hill” dynamic.
I think the trickiest aspect of being a List moderator or administrator may be that you don’t know what is going on behind the scenes. With Listservs that distribute messages through email, the subscribers know each others’ email addresses. H-Net actually reveals them for the world to see when it puts up its web-posted versions of the messages. (Some other Listservs mask the email addresses of subscribers in the web posted versions of their message traffic.)
Offlist messages can be a problem. I know of one (non-H-net) professional Listserv in which I picked up on a dynamic that I thought might hinder open debate. When I mentioned it in passing in the forum, a few female List members emailed me offlist to describe what had happened to them. A handful of women mentioned to me privately that they had received offlist messages from one subscriber. All told me that the offlist messages led them to fall back into lurker status and to read, but no longer post, to the Listserv. The List owner (who rarely participates) seems unaware that this occurred.
You really have to read between the lines to control some of these issues, and I doubt many moderators or blog or list owners have the time or inclination to do that. Some don’t see it as their role. The one thing I try to keep in mind is that people, in whatever profession, often care very, very deeply about their jobs and accomplishments and even may be largely defined by them. They may not entirely recognize that or acknowledge it. But you pick up on it if you know what to look for and can step back from heated debates. Sometimes, I look at something I’ve posted and think, I should have worded it a little differently. It can be difficult to strike the right balance, spelling out what you know without making others feel threatened, and I haven’t always succeeded.
I don’t always succeed, but I do try to remember the importance of underlying issues of pride and status when I participate in forums. You see the way their service defined them in some of the men with a military background who speak up on HNN. You also see that same sense of accomplishment among many academics and government employees (although an historian, I’m in the latter category), as well. It’s natural that this would be the case, pride, and the need to feel that what you’ve done really mattered, are very human reactions. In a few cases, I’ve spoken up on HNN, providing the type of feedback that I hoped would keep people posting who otherwise might give up and fall silent in the face of pushback or putdowns.
I don’t have any data to back it up, but I would guess that more women than men buy and read books by people such as Dr. Tannen. The same is true for books such as “When Generations Collide.” Some workplaces encourage examination of these issues more than others. Left on their own, without being required to do so in order to be better managers or supervisors, I don’t know how many people would read such books. I’m interested in these issues because studying management science and communication both relate to my interest in the Presidency.
Submitted at 8:10 pm Eastern time
Mills:
My you do like to be provocative!
Perhaps you could have referenced the fact that I am one of the three Vice Presidents of H-Net and could also be considered to be a third “… people with lots of H-Net experience at the senior level…”!
There are almost 800 editors on the internal discussion list. If some of them visited your site, and a few of their friends, that would account for much of your vaunted 1500+ hits!
By the way, there are over 180,000 subscribers to H-Net. Some folks subscribe to more than one network, so it boils down to something over 100,000 individual people. However, some of those subscribers are redistribution email accounts. So at least 100,000 and probably something substantially more.
So 100,000 people aren’t ready to “move on.” There are 180 networks (and soon to be more!).
And by the way, any organization needs a means of internal communication. You ignored my invitation to bring the discussion to H-Info. You could check out what they’ve been saying on H-Scholar.
H-Net’s strength (the number of discussion groups) also is its weakness. If you have wide-ranging or interdisciplinary interests, and one group doesn’t work out for you, it’s hard to know which other ones replicate or improve on the dynamic of the group you’re leaving.
More so than in the past, the move to digital record keeping means that historians of the future are dependent on decisions now being made in the private and public sector by records managers, archivists and IT people. People working in those fields need to hear from the future end users, which include scholars.
The relative inaccessibility of the CD that Sony produced in 1994 of the Haldeman Diaries provides a sobering reminder of what can happen when you don’t think ahead. (The program that Sony used to kick off the splash screen for the Haldeman Diaries apparently is set to look for an old Quicktime driver in use in 1994. Not finding it on newer computers, it locks up, preventing scholars from accessing the diaries of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff. I can only use the Haldeman Diaries CD still on my old desktop computer which I bought in 1997, not on my newer notebook computer.
Metadata capture, data retention, migration, and emulation are issues that affect a broad range of scholars, in the handling of the notes and files they themselves are creating now as well as the records they depend on in their research. I have no idea which H-Net discussion groups welcome occasional discussion of such issues in addition to debates about the actual content of historical records. (I recognize scholars don’t have the time to immerse themselves in all the issues, but they do need to have a general awareness of them in order to act as effective advocates.) Subscribers to the one to which I once subscribed had no apparent interest in IT, archival and records management issues. Nor could I trigger discussion of the challenges that the National Archives faces as a subordinate agency within the executive branch.
My experience on that List can be summed up by the comment one scholar once posted in 2001 in response to one of my messages, in which I sought to explain why releasing records was not always easy for the National Archives, my former employer: “There is no need to gain insight into NARA’s problems, it is the solution to the scholars’ problems that require attention.” I hung in for 6 years after that point but finally gave up. Unfortunately, I have no way to tell how widespread is that sentiment and which H-Net Lists are more welcoming of the governmental or archival perspective. There simply are too many for me to sample.
Submitted on personal time at 8:49 am Eastern time
Thanks Matthew for the response – and a big thanks to Katja and Maarja for their excellent discussion of these issues!
Matthew, I picked up on your suggestion that I take a look at the H-Scholar list’s discussion of my post and have written an entirely new post on what I found.
Regarding the numbers you cite, what I’d really like to see is not the total number of members, although 100,000 plus is clear evidence that H-Net remains an important scholarly resource (I never said it wasn’t–I just speculated that change in its mode of content delivery was needed). What I would really like to see are statistics on actual traffic on each individual list. To that end, I’ve written to Kriste Lindenmeyer (the president of H-Net for those of you who don’t know) to request these data. If H-Net were to make these data available for each of the networks, then it would be possible to engage in some very interesting analysis of the ups and downs of the various H-Net communities over time–just the kind of analysis historians are trained to do.
Now to your point about H-Net traffic versus the traffic on my blog. To set it up as a dichotomy between all the activity on H-Net and the activity on my blog “your vaunted 1500+ hits” as you put it, is to clearly create a false dichotomy. So, let’s try to set up a more accurate comparison:
I used the term visitors, not hits. There is an important distinction here. A visitor to a blog/webpage is a person who actively clicks on a link to visit that webpage and our log analysis software counts each visitor per month in two ways–as a unique visitor (they get counted only once) and as a repeat visitor. Then there are pages viewed by those visitors and hits (which include the serving up of images, etc.). So, “hits” is essentially a worthless statistic and I therefore don’t use it. From May 1, 2007 until 9:45 am today, my blog has had 25,680 unique visitors who have viewed 56,839 individual pages in the blog. The unique visitor count is reset every month, so my monthly average since May 1 is around 5,000.
I would submit that a more reasonable comparison between the traffic on my blog and H-Net use would be to say that my blog was the rough equivalent of one H-Net network since my blog is concerned first and foremost with one topic–the intersection of history, technology, and education. And, I would suggest that my unique visitor count is a rough approximation of an H-Net list’s membership count. My count is much, much more fluid, but 5,000 people each month lay their eyeballs on at least one message that I’ve written. Finally, I would offer up page views as another rough approximation of traffic–H-Net counts messages delivered to list members who may or may not read them, I’ll count pages clicked on by visitors, who likewise may or may not read them. In both cases, that’s probably the best we can do to estimate actual user interaction with the content delivered.
So, if we accept these rough approximations, my blog is a community with around 5,000 members (each of whom has to actively click on a link to access the content rather than just having it delivered into their inbox) and those members view, on an annualized basis, around slightly over 150,000 pages. I’m sure that there are H-Net lists with significantly more than 5,000 members. And if those lists generate at least 30 message a month on average, then the amount of content they deliver to their community is around the same amount as the content I deliver.
Of course, there are plenty of H-Net lists with far less traffic/membership, just as there are scholarly blogs with far less traffic/readers. What seems important to me, though, is that we try as much as possible to compare apples to apples, rather than apples to oranges.
Do you have any sense for how many H-Net lists are in the same ballpark of community size/amount of content delivered? This is why I would love to see the traffic data I referenced earlier.
Finally, a quick question. Does H-Net or MATRIX publish an annual report? I could find no mention of one online.
Thanks for your continued engagement in this discussion.
Mills