What would happen if historians made their research notes public? What would it look like to make our notebooks “open source”?
Some historians already do this, of course, after retirement or the completion of a research project. Many scholars deposit their research notes posthumously in the special collections or archives of the universities where they spent their careers. Many are willing to share old notes or sources with inquiring students or friends.1
But can these fairly common practices be considered Open Source history?
It depends on what you mean by that term. In the world of software development, the decision to release, or make “open,” the source code for a program can mean two very different things. In some cases, it signals that active development on a program has effectively ceased; open source is the elephant’s graveyard where some formerly proprietary programs go to die. In most cases, though, open source software (OSS) is code that anyone can inspect and change even while the software is in active development. It’s software that encourages collaboration and sharing at the earliest stages of a project’s life.2
Most historians who decide to “open” their research notes for public view more closely resemble the first kind of OSS developer than the second. As Andrew Berger has astutely observed, we are usually willing to share sources when we are finished with them, when the publications that they were gathered to support have been released, or when we are not “actively using” what we have found. But in this post I’m asking about a different possibility: what would it look like to make our notebooks digital and “open source” from the very beginning of a project?3