The field of Digital History is expanding in new ways that we could not have imagined only five or ten years ago. Digital History, a component of Digital Humanities, is more than a medium for publishing or another repository for archival work. Digital History is using digital tools to make connections which allows analysis leading to new realizations in ways that we could not see. For example, it is possible for Digital Historians to do many things that others could have done in the past such as quantitative analysis, but now Digital Historians can take that quantitative analysis in new directions linking to similar texts with high percentages of similar words or similar styles, finding new connections between otherwise dissimilar texts. Textual analysis is just one direction that digital history is moving.
New social networking tools allow historians working throughout the world to link together and share information. It is the direction of community that many innovators thought the web would go, but it is with the newest iterations of the Internet that allow machines to talk to each other and share information.
Digital history has piqued my attention since the first times I heard about it. I had been working with internet applications in various forms, but it was the arrival of Dr. William Thomas at the University of Nebraska that allowed me to first build web pages to display information and to dabble with digital displays of my work. I think it is time to work further in that direction, pushing the envelopes of data mining and using my digital tools to find new connections that could not be seen without those tools.