Historians are less likely than other scholars to apply new technologies in their work, even if many have made big strides in this area in recent decades, suggests research presented here Saturday at the annual conference of the American Historical Association.
One study presented here found that historians stand out among scholars in the humanities and other fields in having substantial reservations about college libraries switching from print to online-only journal subscriptions.
The Ithaka group, a nonprofit organization that promotes technology in higher education, conducted the analysis by teasing out the responses from 198 historians who took part in a 2009 survey of about 3,000 faculty members of four-year colleges in the United States. It found that faculty members in the humanities, as a whole, were less willing than were scholars in other areas to embrace the use of new digital media in their work, and that historians were slower than others in the humanities to do so.
Along with being less likely than other scholars to think colleges should switch from print to online-only journals, historians also stood out from other scholars in being much more likely to oppose the idea of scholarly publishers producing only the electronic versions of what had once been print journals.
“There is a cult of print that is hard to diminish,” said Francis X. Blouin Jr., a professor of history and of information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who took part in a panel discussion of the research results.
A second study presented here, which was based on a survey of nearly 4,200 historians conducted by the American Historical Association, found that just 4.3 percent of respondents were quick to adopt, and make significant use of, multiple digital technologies in their work.
On the other end of the spectrum, 2.4 percent of the respondents described themselves as very reluctant to use new technology. And nearly a fourth limited their use of new technology mainly to word processing and online searches, and relied heavily on others to teach them now to use new technologies and computer programs.
Just over two-thirds tended to adopt new technologies somewhat regularly, by teaching themselves how to use them, and reported employing a variety of different technologies in their research and teaching.
In describing the study’s findings, Robert B. Townsend, the association’s assistant director of research and publications, took a positive tone, saying the field of history had undergone “a remarkable transformation” in its use of technology since he began working for his organization 21 years ago. Just 14 years ago, he noted, a survey of the association’s members found that 70 percent rarely, if ever, read articles on the World Wide Web.
“We can all see that scholarship is fundamentally and rapidly changing,” said William G. Thomas III, chairman of the history department at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, who described in detail how electronic data banks and other online resources have drastically reduced how long it takes him to research historical records.
Mr. Townsend observed, however, that while the younger faculty members in the association’s survey tended to be more receptive to new technology than the older ones, his analysis found enough resistance to new media among young historians to suggest “the problems of technological resistance in the discipline will not be solved simply by the passing of one generation into the next.”
