ABSTRACT
This is a call for more and better collaboration. Not just among individuals, but between whole sub-disciplines of history. Environmental and digital history, as Andrew Murphie suggests in a roundtable published by the journal Environmental Humanities, have astounding similarities when it comes to collaboration, sharing, and improving the ways heritage is preserved (Murphie, Jørgensen, Gibbs, and Hardenberg 2013). Both disciplines can only gain from adopting (and adapting) methods, tools, and ideas from each other. We are all part of a “scholarly ecosystem” (Underwood 2015), a metaphor that
seems particularly apt for explaining the links between digital and environmental history and how the two disciplines are connected. In this essay, we call on environmental historians to examine not only their methodologies and epistemologies, but also the role of the digital in the political economy/ecology of environmental history knowledge production and distribution. In particular, we ask them to consider how digital developments affect-and might improve-their own practices and the practices of their community. Moreover, in environmental history and related fields, more needs to be done to connect disparate research efforts, to reach a broader public, and to ensure that the past informs the future. By cultivating a “spirit of the commons,” or what others call a “culture of togetherness” (König 2015), digital tools present a wealth of opportunities to increase transparency, communication, and democracy, expand data, and uncover new sources, leading to new perspectives and new research questions. A young field with roots in environmentalism and in an understanding of the
environment as culturally constructed, environmental history is inherently dynamic and diverse. The field has strong regional societies and an energetic, collegial community that includes colleagues in places where it is not recognized as a field. Those who identify as environmental historians have a variety of views on research priorities and frameworks, what lessons environmental history holds for practitioners and policymakers, and how activism fits in this spectrum. In spite of these differences, most agree that communication-both scholarly and public-is essential to a field that “aims to contribute positively to human understanding and decisions” (Coulter and Mauch 2011, p. 7). You don’t have to be a digital native to understand the advantages of reaching broad groups of people with common interests. For environmental historians, as is explained in this
volume by Kheraj and Oosthoek (see Chapter 18), subscribing to HEnvironment, a subgroup of H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online), is a main way of keeping informed about developments in the field. Yet environmental history, like the rest of historical scholarship, is still very
much bound to the classic interpretation of research work as an enterprise in which solitude grants freedom. As Anthony Grafton (2011) reminds us in a piece published a few years ago in Perspectives on History, while historians are expected to perform “unremitting, solitary intellectual work,” this vision is however, at least partly, mythical: “Every realized work of scholarship, even one that bears the name of a single author, is the product of many individuals working together in different ways.” Environmental history, an inherently transdisciplinary field in which research depends on both cooperation with practitioners in other fields and the ability to read and interpret research outputs from a variety of disciplines, is a pre-eminent example of the need to fully embrace such a point of view. The same is even truer for digital history. By “digital tools” we mean the technologies (such as databases, search engines,
application programming interfaces, mapping software, and social media) that help us gather, organize, filter, discover, connect, visualize, contribute, and share information. Others’ engagement with this information contributes to its transformation into knowledge. For example, the Smithsonian’s Bumblebee Project (https://transcription.si.edu/project/6780) shows volunteers images of digital photographs of bees, and lets them input the information found on each bee’s tag, including the location where the bee was collected, directly into a new database. Information that used to be viewable only in person and by appointment, will become discoverable and comparable, accessible to everyone. This will transform the kinds of questions researchers can ask, and may even lead to new knowledge about the reasons for pollinator decline. In addition to facilitating the production of new knowledge, digital tools help researchers more easily discuss, cite, and share their findings beyond traditionally small circles of colleagues. Such digital tools-already too prevalent to be ignored-have indeed the potential to disrupt habits and structures in a positive way and make the cooperative nature of research more evident and widely accepted. There is hope for increased acceptance of these tools as proper products of scholarship: in June 2015 the American Historical Association approved its Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians, recognizing the burgeoning number of formats adopted by professional historians in the twenty-first century and the need to give credit for all contributions to historical knowledge independently from the medium (Denbo 2015). This essay, in which we introduce an absolutely notexhaustive sample of digital developments, practices, and collections that present opportunities to move toward a new, more collaborative, disciplinary ecology, aims to fuel a discussion on this topic and attract new scholars to experiment on the border of the digital and the environmental. We start by explaining what we believe could be the role of a “spirit of the commons” in digital environmental history, then provide a few examples of running projects, and finally discuss obstacles and opportunities of such a venture.
