Although technologists constantly praise computers as ‘universal machines’, and while it is true that they are remarkably flexible and powerful, this does not mean that we should use them for every kind of historical effort or production. We can truly begin to think about history in the second decade of the web, and to postulate new, more appropriate and ideally more enlightening forms of online history when we begin to look beyond the distribution of documents (including essays, articles, exhibits, news and messages) and consider instead the collection, interrelation and exploration of those documents. Much of the problem here is conceptual: from the beginning of the web historians have largely discussed nouns such as web pages and websites, rather than verbs such as searching, sorting, gathering and communicating.

More than ten years of experience with the web has allowed us to understand what the medium does well and what it does poorly, and how we may improve online historical efforts so they capitalize on the web’s strengths while avoiding its weaknesses. This essay explores three possible ways to advance digital history: interaction between historians and their subjects, interoperation of dispersed historical archives, and the analysis of online resources using computational methods. Thinking about such possibilities raises important, age-old questions about how we should preserve and chronicle the past.