The Net and the Chain. Historians in the Internet times

di Peppino Ortoleva
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 3 (1999), p. 31

As the so called constructionist historians of science and technology have demonstrated, technical change is mediated by the "relevant social groups" that negotiate it, its pace and its effects. Thinking historians, and humanities scholars in general, as one of the relevant social groups in the advent of the Internet is not obvious. But if we think in these terms we may find some interesting phenomena: the convergence of amateurism and professionalism in the web culture; the tendency to substitute essays with data banks as privileged scientific output; the articulation of the global with the extremely localized and specialized are all fruits of a negotiation that has deeply involved the scientific communities, among the historians as among "hard" scientists.