Here is new format for digital scholarly publishing I an considering for my new “book” project : a “perpetual history” that would be released serially and then refined and expanded for an indefinite period, rather like a one author Wikipedia article. Is this good idea? How could such a work be made interesting and useful for both scholars and Internet users, and legitimate as a form of scholarly publication? What platform should be used to create it? Citations would be the big problem. They have to be there, and it would be so exciting to have readers be able to click through to actual sources, but how could that be accomplished?

Discussion of this idea could easily be grouped in with other people’s idea for new formats.

1. Contrary to what I had once thought, most entering history students at my midrange institution are not yet “born digital” in terms of their approach to history or writing. History almost seems to draw in the analog-oriented. Our students are on Facebook, they can Google things, and maybe they have seen JSTOR, but so far they are not generally any more comfortable with blogging, tweeting, or website-building, for scholarly purposes, than most of my colleagues, which is to say, very uncomfortable.
2. An especially compelling reason for upgrading the digital history skills of students in my field, early American history, is the rise of online research resources, including various Founders’ papers, Early American Imprints, various newspaper databases and the large swaths of source material Google Books and the Internet Archive? Personally I have found these resources very convenient — every old book I ever checked out of Widener Library seems to have been digitized — but I have found it quite hard to manage the resulting profusion of pdfs and image files and such. The instant access to so much material also affects the research and writing process in profound ways that need to be considered. What are the best strategies for dealing with such abundance?