20 Feb 2008
“Open source” encapsulates the idea that knowledge should be free, and that people should be able to hack, modify or improve upon existing products. Can we imagine historical work “without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors,” as Rosenzweig puts it? What will that mean for the future of the historian’s craft?
Readings for Discussion
Cohen, Daniel J. “![[WWW]](http://wikispot.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/sycamore-www.png){kind=small}
The Wikipedia Story That’s Being Missed,” dancohen.org (20 Dec 2005).
Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig. “Owning the Past,” Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
Cohen, Patricia. “At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web,” New York Times (12 Feb 2008).
Jordan, John. “For a Canadian Wikipedia,” Participant Historian (7 Nov 2006). (N.B. John wrote this blog post for History 513 in 2006, and won the coveted Cliopatria Award for Best Post.)
Kelly, T. Mills. “What’s for Dinner?,” “(cont’d 1),” “(cont’d 2),” and “Whither Wiki?” edwired (Apr-Jun 2006).
Rosenzweig, Roy. “The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web,” Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (Sep 2001): 548-579.
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Should Historical Scholarship Be Free?” AHA Perspectives (Apr 2005).
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Digital Archives are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely,” Chronicle of Higher Education 51, no. 42 (24 Jun 2005): B20.
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (Jun 2006): 117-146.
Schiff, Stacy. “Know It All,” The New Yorker (31 Jul 2006).
Stallman, Richard M. “The Free Software Definition,” (2004).
Unsworth, John M. “The Next Wave: Liberation Technology,” Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 21 (30 Jan 2004).
Technical Background Readings
Cohn, David. “Free Beer for Geeks,” Wired (18 Jul 2005).
Nuvolari, Alessandro. “Open Source Software Development: Some Historical Perspectives,” First Monday 10, no. 10 (Oct 2005).
Sanger, Larry. “The New Politics of Knowledge,” Constructing the Digital Universe (31 Jul 2006).
Terdiman, Daniel. “Can German Engineering Fix Wikipedia?” CNET News (23 Aug 2006).
Tonkin, Emma. “Making the Case for a Wiki,” Ariadne Magazine 42 (Jan 2005).
Wales, Jimmy. “Free Knowledge Requires Free Software and Free File Formats,” Jimmy Wales (21 Oct 2004).
Individual Exercise
Easy. Give something back. OK, now it’s your turn. Choose some topic from your research and write a short Wikipedia entry for it. If an entry already exists, make it better. Make a note of your changes. For the rest of the course, monitor your entry to see how it fares, just like Mills Kelly did for his Donner Party entry.
Further Reading
Benkler, Yochai. “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm,” The Yale Law Journal 112 (2002).
Cornell University, “Internet-First Publishing Project at Cornell Offers New and Old Books Free Online or To Be Printed on Demand.” (30 Jan 2004).
O’Reilly, Tim. “The Architecture of Participation,” oreillynet.com (6 Apr 2003).
Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2001.
Weber, Steven. The Success of Open Source. Harvard, 2005.
