This article “What is Digital History? A Look at Some Exemplar projects” written by Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas III ∥2009∥ focuses on what exactly is digital history, what the next stage of digital history entailed and the future of digital history.

“Digital History is an approach to examining and representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the internet network and software systems.” Douglas Seefeldt, William G. Thomas III ∥2009∥. Digital History is different on many levels. One on level, it is an open arena of scholarly production and communication, encompassing the development of new course materials and scholarly data collection efforts. While on another level, digital history is a methodological approach framed by the hyper textual power of technology to make, define, query and annotate associations in the human record of the past. For one to do digital history, they must create a framework through the technology for people to experience, read and follow an argument about a major historical problem. In Digital History, readers are not presented with an exhibit, or an article with many appendices, or any other analog form simply reprocessed into a web-deliverable format. Instead the readers are presented with a suite of interpretive elements and ways to gain leverage on the problem under investigation.

In January 2004, Roy Rosenzwelg identified the necessary shift from experimentation with the tools and theories of digital scholarship to something more permanent. He noted the need for the next stage of digital history at an event he organized prior to the one hundred and eighteenth annual meeting of the American Historical Association which was titled “Entering the Second Stage of Online History Scholarship”. The second stage of digital history would require interdisciplinary collaboration, the likes of which majority of historians had yet to embrace. The second stage also required cooperative initiatives that would involve a variety of people such as historians, programmers, information architects, designers and publishers.

The future digital environment might challenge some traditional methods of digital history and perhaps even the craft-oriented practices of the discipline. The sources would almost entirely be digital; in other words, in the form of instant messages, emails, doc files, PDFs, digital video, podcasts and databases. Due to the scale and complexity of the sources, historians would utilize tools and techniques that were not yet a part of their practice to create their own digital sources while employing tools created by others. In the time of this article, the authors wanted graduate students to be introduced to a variety of research and teaching tools at their disposal. Some of the tools included, Zotero, del.icio.us, Google Earth, Google Books, Wikipedia, SIMILE, Scribe and Token. “In fact, we, as a field, must endeavor to shift the focus of digital historical scholarship away from the product-oriented exhibit or “web site” and move it more toward the process oriented work of employing new media tools in our research and analysis— “doing” digital history. But in order for digital history data to be considered a scholarly product in and of itself, to inform our own research and to be shared with others, we will need to more fully address the accompanying challenges of quality ∥peer review∥, preservation, and open access.” Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas III ∥2009∥.

The digital process has grown so much over the years that the future of digital history discussed in the article has become reality. The process and growth of digital history has become increasingly important and relative as individuals discover more and more what history looks like in the digital medium.