Digital History Hacks

[A newer edition of this post is available here]

The web is an archive that is constantly changing and effectively infinite. What kind of research techniques can historians develop to make use of it? There are already a number of excellent resources for people who want to present history on the web, such as Cohen and Rosenzweig's Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web. There seem to be far fewer resources for historians who want to create tools for doing historical research, especially ones involving some web programming. Inspired by the O'Reilly series on hacks and finding that quick searches with Google and Yahoo! don't return any hits for "digital history hacks," I've decided to roll some of my own.

Tags: digital history | hacking