William Cronon says history and geography survive the digital age

A leading historical geographer has called on both his disciplines to find better ways of “navigating the digital world”.

William Cronon, who is Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was delivering the first in a new series of British Academy lectures in geography at London’s Royal Geographical Society on 7 July.

He was interested, he told the audience, in “the bridge between the academy and its many publics”. But although history and geography ranked “among the greatest synthesizing disciplines” and could help to “make the world more meaningful, more legible, for everyone”, academics had shown themselves to be far too “old media” and ran the risk of “isolating [them]selves in a pay-wall universe”.

“History has traditionally required long-form prose,” explained Professor Cronon, and it now counted as “the only academic discipline in the United States which still generally requires a monograph for tenure”. At the same time, most students no longer “read for pleasure” and “a growing number of academic administrators come from disciplines which no longer have a use for books”.

The increasing use of citation indices and impact factors, Professor Cronon went on, encouraged academics to write in the “smallest publishable units” to a specialised, elite readership. As journals have “preformed audiences”, books have essentially been left behind. And with “academics now often required to underwrite the costs of journal publication”, this put a particular burden on “underfunded disciplines”. ...