I thought I'd share a link to this site, Digital History Hacks.
From his "About" (sort of buried in the "archive"):
My premise is that the web constitutes the largest, most easily-accessible archive that people have ever created, and also the most radically unfamiliar. Material is being added to the web at an exponential rate, but it is of low average quality; it usually has an uncertain provenance and uncertain lifespan. Much of it is created by machines and meant to be ‘understood’ by other machines.
Historians and other humanists and social scientists need a new set of computational tools for dealing with the web. About half of the posts in Digital History Hacks are devoted to making the argument for a new historical discipline that is analogous to bioinformatics, and draws on machine learning, computational linguistics, information retrieval and other fields. The rest of the posts are about hacks, short programs that demonstrate the potential of digital history, and are designed to be shared, extended or modified (i.e., hacked) by others.
He received something called a "Cliopatria" award, which I'd never heard of, so I checked it out. The past awardees include some interesting clicking.
