Changing Our Minds: Legal History Meets the World Wide Web

BERNARD J. HIBBITTS

Legal historians have had an ambivalent relationship with new technology. As students and spokespersons of the somewhat-stodgy legal past, our sympathies have predictably been with traditional methods of doing things rather than with the latest and greatest devices of our own age. In the twentieth century we have tended to champion writing and books more than radio, television, and computers. Today we may use new tools to help us create our scholarship and even to help us teach, but like most of our academic colleagues in law and in history we generally employ those tools as extensions of established media instead of exploiting their potential to deploy information and develop ideas in new ways.	1
Our first forays into cyberspace have been consistent with precedent. So far we have tended to use the World Wide Web as a virtual photocopier—a technology that allows us to deliver electronic copies of our traditional products (journals, articles, conference papers, syllabi, and so forth)—to a mass audience of scholars, students, and other interested parties. Now this in itself is not insignificant—reaching a worldwide, interdisciplinary public and bringing information and ideas to bear on them at a fraction of the cost of older media is something to be celebrated, not criticized. But before we become self-satisfied, we should consider the technological and indeed metaphysical distance that exists between the Web as legal historians now use it and the Web as it could be used.	2
This distance exists in a number of dimensions. For example, the Web need not be just a one-way presentation tool. It also supports e-mail, chat, and collaborative editing scripts that facilitate interactivity and teamwork; in these capacities the Web could one day shift the emphasis of our scholarship from monologue to dialogue, finally transforming faculty lounge rhetoric into reality. We also tend to use the Web as an electronic archive of finished products. But the quick and easy revisability of Web documents favors the development of dynamic works that may derive their academic worth more from their currency than from their completion.	3
In this column, however, I want to consider another underutilized aspect of the Web that I think holds even greater potential for the transformation of legal history as a discipline. The Web is a multimedia tool: not only can it carry text, but it can transmit speech, sound, images, and video—and one day, given the ability of computer technology to digitize sensations of touch and smell, perhaps even more.	4
The multimedia capacity of the Web may not be obvious to everyone, not even to some legal historians who may use it frequently. A number of prosaic factors still conspire to occlude it—the lack of speakers on many office computer systems, the lack of "plug-ins" (like the RealPlayer) needed to display voice and video files, slow network connections that may lead some Web users to just turn off their images, the survival in some quarters of text-only Lynx browsers, and so forth. As our connections speed up, our machines improve, and we ourselves gain more online experience, however, the multimedia power of the Web will become more and more obvious. We will not simply read online—we will also listen and watch.	5
But the Internet is more than a passive community of people accessing information—at its best, it is also an active community of users who create content. In a Web-based multimedia environment in which audio and video tools are readily and cheaply available, legal historians and others will be subtly encouraged (indeed, they will eventually be expected) to present themselves and their ideas in sound, in color, in image, in gesture—in other words, to become producers and performers instead of just writers. The transition to this new multimedia scholarship will not be easy. The present generation of legal historians has been overtly selected for its members' ability to present words on a page, not ideas in action. The Web challenges us to develop new literacies—visual, chromatic, aural, and even kinetic—that will allow us to "read" and "write" in new ways. Text composition may remain the foundation of what we do for some time, but it will be no longer be the be-all and end-all of our scholarly existence. At some point, senior faculty and administrators in law schools and history departments might even consider making mastery of these new technologically mediated literacies a prerequisite of hiring and promotion. This proposal might strike some as peculiar, even ridiculous, but in theory is it any less peculiar than our long-standing requirement that in a text-based society, legal historians be highly skilled manipulators of text?	6
If the Web encourages us to seek new expressive horizons, it may also—somewhat more subtly—encourage us to reconsider the parameters of legal history itself. Traditionally and predictably, legal history presented in text has focused on texts. Written material has provided the discipline with its most important form of evidence and its most common object of interpretation. We have certainly been aware of "contextual" elements of (and survivals from) the legal past—oral tradition, rhetoric, gesture, ceremony, costume, architecture, and so forth—but the scholarly requirement of pushing our ideas through print has largely filtered out direct representations of those and has severely limited our ability to discuss them intelligently. With a different set of media at our disposal, legal historians in the age of cyberspace will not be so limited. Indeed, as we become comfortable with new media, we will probably take a far greater interest in "sensual" aspects of law that will be both more obvious and more accessible to us.	7
Over time, new technological tools and the new horizons they open up will almost certainly make the future of legal history more than just its past by other means. Given the scale of the information revolution that we are just beginning to experience, it is taking no great risk to suggest that as purveyors of text-based, text-driven academic monologues, we will eventually appear as quaint and as narrow to our colleagues of the late twenty-first century as our academic forebearers of the late nineteenth or perhaps even late eighteenth century now appear to us. The Web invites us to change our minds—to think about doing and regarding legal history in new ways. Carpe diem.	8
Bernard J. Hibbitts is associate dean for communications and information technology and professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the director of JURIST: The Law Professors' Network http://jurist.law.pitt.edu .

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