ABSTRACT

On January 23, 1996, Professor Dennis Williams from Southern Nazarene University declared, “Today begins a new epoch [for] all of us who have been discussing environmental history electronically for the past few years.” This was the first message sent to the H-ASEH (later renamed H-Environment) email listserv, now more than twenty years ago. H-ASEH was the successor to the previous ASEH-L email listserv that Williams started in 1991. While some environmental historians had previously communicated in smaller, closed computer networks in the past, the advent of email listservs and the H-Net consortium was the beginning of widespread online digital communication and networking among environmental history scholars. In the two decades since Williams posted that first message, online digital

technologies have opened up new avenues for the communication of research findings and the development of research networks among environmental historians. In fact, environmental historians have been leaders in the use of online digital communications technologies in the environmental humanities. As Cheryl Lousley (2015, p. 3) recently wrote, “Among environmental humanities scholars, it is the environmental historians who have been most adept at reconfiguring scholarly research and communication in light of emerging digital possibilities.” This chapter examines the changing uses of online digital technologies for communication and networking in the environmental history research community. It offers a survey of the history of online environmental history activities and a snapshot of the contemporary uses of such technologies. These technologies have influenced scholarship in the field of environmental history in a number of important ways. First, they have facilitated the development and growth of regional, national, and international scholarly networks. Second, they have extended the reach of environmental history research findings, making this research accessible to communities beyond the academy, including educators, policy makers, journalists, and public history audiences. Finally, environmental historians have begun to make use of online digital technologies for the development of new forms of scholarly publication.