Question: How Have Internet Developments Changed What—or How—You Study about the Middle East?

Abstract

The most obvious answer to this question would be to underline the huge impact of the Internet on research on the Middle East: the speed with which material is circulated among colleagues, reviewers, and editors; the increasing availability of documents and materials; the ease of access to scholarly work through online databases; the availability of scholarly forums (such as H-Net) for exchanging information and views; and a long list of other benefits. My own correspondence with a publisher and some journal editors in the past few months is a case in point: a seven-month strike declared by postal and other public-sector workers to protest the Palestinian Authority’s nonpayment of salaries stopped all mail services to and from the occupied territories. Without the Internet (and private mail carriers) I certainly could not have published what I did manage to publish in these turbulent times. There are more substantive implications of Internet developments for scholars of the Middle East, and I would like to focus on two of them in the short space allowed here.