Amidst the dynamic development of digital history and humanities in the early-20th century, it is possible to identify several leading forms of the interface between humanities (and social sciences) scholarship and digital technology.

Text Mining

Digital technology allows users to identify, characterize, measure, and compare the use of key words, concepts, and other types of expressions in print culture, archival material, and a myriad of other representational forms. Historians interested in the increasing usage of a key political term – republicanism, for instance – are able to mine the evolution of that term over time and by spatial location. A leading tool in this area is Google Books Ngam viewer.

Digital Preservation

The digitization of written texts, multimedia, visual images, and other forms of primary sources is a profound accomplishment of this new technology. A leading effort in this realm is literary historian’s representation of rare and popular texts along with the complex notation and multi strata analysis of the material therein.   Key examples of preservation projects include the British Museum’s Discovering Literature – Romantics and Victorians and Lehigh University’s Beyond Steel.

Documentary Film

While the combination of written and spoken text with motion picture and still imagery goes back to the turn of the 20th century, the documentary film genre has expanded greatly through the digital revolution and its component parts – including the proliferation of low priced digital cameras and smartphones, the ubiquity of software editing systems, and the founding of YouTube.  Documentary film has never been so prominent a form of political and cultural expression.

Oral History

A longstanding methodology of historical research, oral history has become an even more prevalent and powerful practice with the digital recording of interviews, tagging systems that allow for key word searches, and the interactive presentation of the interviews themselves. A leading example of a digitally integrated oral history project is USC’s Shoah Foundation.

Geographic Information System

Geographic Information System (GIS) creates the ability to develop a digital map from a database. It is a foundation for projects that carefully categorize information to develop a product to answer complex and spatially oriented historical questions.  GIS is a dynamic fusion of statistical information demonstrating historical significance. It interconnects this information with chosen coordinates plotted on a map with scholarly questions driving and connecting both data sets. Key projects by GIS are the University of Virginia’s Valley of the Shadow and Yale’s Photogrammar.

Graphical User Interface

Often overlooked and last to be developed during digital humanities projects, the graphical user interface (GUI) is the space where human and machine interact.  A poorly designed interface can lead to user frustration and abandonment of the project.  Recently, digital humanities interfaces have become better designed for usability and function.  Furthermore, as digital humanities projects become more sophisticated, graphic artists and designers, as well as learning experts are more prevalent on cross-functional teams to ensure that form and function of the tool are consistent.

Crowd Source Analysis

Digital technology, especially mobile devices, have brought the democratization of representation and contribution. Individuals separated by space and time can, in real time, add their thoughts, images, predilections, and other related content to a central database. A leading example of documentary crowd sourcing is Historian’s Eye.

Virtual Historical Realities

Science fiction has long imagined a time machine, allowing one to travel to a specific place in time and experience it as if you had lived then and there. With digital technology, historians and humanists are now able to create three dimensional representations of specific places in time–Ancient Rome, for instance. These models allow for historical hypothesizes to be tested in a virtual environment.  They allow history students to better imagine the look and “feel” of places in the distant past.  The Digital Roman Forum provide these opportunities.

Enhanced Monographs

For as long as the book has been the central mode of scholarship, historians have sought to integrate imagery and other material into their discussion. Digital technology allow for embedding moving pictures and interactive elements into written text. Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland stands as a breakthrough monograph with embedded content.