Mailing list archives as useful primary sources for historians: looking for flame wars

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to show the potential of mailing list archives as primary sources for studying recent history of science. In order to focus on the debates regarding software within the computational chemistry community in the 1990s, the corpus we rely on consists in a scholarly mailing list, a typical corpus from its time, conceived, constructed and maintained by a community. The threaded conversations of the list also constitute a unique rhetorical form in its organisation which is technically bound to the Internet-based media of that time. We first present the issues at stake within our research topic and show how relevant is such a corpus to address them. We then discuss the “ethnographic” characteristics and the structure of the corpus. Its most interesting parts are the “flame wars”, that is outbursts of heated, short and dense debates, in an ocean of evenly distributed polite messages. We unveil how the relevant flame wars are located and extracted by producing a graphical representation of the number of messages per day over time. Once flame wars are isolated, the messages exchanged by practitioners are studied precisely to comprehend the argumentative structure of the debates and the different viewpoints of actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific software
• computational chemistry
• mailing list
• flame war
• threaded conversation
• computer-mediated communication
• scientific communication

Acknowledgment

This paper is dedicated to Jan Labanowski.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Foobar is the name we use to anonymise this “popular electronic structure program”. We will name Foobar the software package and Foobar, Inc. the corporation which commercialises it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandre Hocquet

Frédéric Wieber is maître de conférences in History and Philosophy of Science at the Université de Lorraine (Nancy, France). He is a member of the laboratory “Archives Henri-Poincaré – Philosophie et Recherches sur les Sciences et les Technologies”, UMR 7117 CNRS – Université de Lorraine et Université de Strasbourg. He has a PhD in history and philosophy of science from Université Paris Diderot. His works include papers on the history of computational chemistry and on the calibration of scientific instruments. He is more generally interested in the tools used in theoretical and computational scientific practices.

Frédéric Wieber

Alexandre Hocquet is an ex computational chemist academic and now a Professeur des Universités in history of science at the Université de Lorraine and a member of the same laboratory. His focus is on STS, particularly the relationships between software and production of knowledge with works on computational chemistry, but also Wikipedia and Football Manager. Methodologically, his works rely on the analysis of threaded conversations in webforums or mailing lists. More at http://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet.