The future of information history

Abstract

This panel discusses developments in the scholarship of information history and speculates on its future. Previously, history was a distinct mode of research and a specialty community within information science; it operated largely outside of the mainstream scholarship that was underway within the dominant empirical and rational paradigms. Today, more social and culturally-oriented approaches have gained momentum across the discipline and these frameworks include an historical perspective as one dimension of their conceptual apparatus. As a result, an historical sensibility is now embedded more broadly across a larger swath of scholarship. This is an exciting and welcome development for champions of history--but it is also problematical. The new historical dimension to research is diffuse and its practitioners typically do not identify as historians. To illustrate the new ambiguous place: there is no obvious home for this historical panel in the track-based program structure of the ASIS&T annual meeting. From a variety of angles, our panel traces the recent breakthrough and mainstreaming of history and aims to characterize its new face. The panel includes a classically trained historian, a theorist, and two scholars whose research features historical themes but is centered outside an historical specialty. A concluding discussion among panelists and the audience will be guided by a big question: What is the future of information history? KeywordsHistory, theoretical foundations, disciplinary structure THE PANELAfter a brief introduction by Jenna Hartel, each panelist will speak for a maximum of 12 minutes, as ordered below, and be timed. Following the presentations, there will be a 30 minute discussion period that will be moderated by Thomas Haigh. (Haigh, 2011). As a point of departure for the panel's thesis, Dr. Haigh will ask why and how we study the past. He will then outline the current set of overlapping scholarly communities concerned with information history, before sketching arguments for and against the panel's thesis that historical perspectives are often embedded in our field's emerging research practices.