Live From 2003: BEARS Is Back Online
BEARS? Sounds familiar. Then I clicked and saw this —
—and it all came back to me.
Yes, kids, this is what the internet used to look like (and this was a pretty smart-looking site for the time).
Begun in 1995 and last active in 2003, the Brown Electronic Article Review Service was one of the first online journals in philosophy. Maybe the first? The idea was “to electronically publish short but substantial reviews of articles that have appeared in the last six months. By keeping them under 1000 words, they can be easily read by those trying to keep up with recent work. Still, this length allows a substantial critical discussion.”
The site had been down for a long time but is now up. Go see who the brave pioneers of electronic publishing were. Meanwhile, I’m suddenly nostalgic for telnet.
(via David Estlund)
BEARS!!! Internet nostalgia. That was a pioneering online philosophy web-page. Long may it live!
It’s back?! I just did the hamster dance of joy! Be be be de be de dee dooo…
DA BEARS!
I trawled through a whole bunch of old hard drives seeing if I had copies of the Anderson symposium for a student, just weeks ago. Nice to see this back.
Happy to see the site back up. I guess I just missed being a genuine pioneer by 7 days. (Although Dave Estlund and Jamie Dreier were the real pioneers for putting it together.) I do remember not being sure how to treat this on a CV and also not being sure how to cite it when I developed my first BEARS paper into a longer piece for a print journal. But it was really gratifying to have Frank Jackson and Phillip Pettit respond relatively quickly to something I’d written, back when working in the middle of the continent even with great colleagues felt a bit isolated compared to grad school.