Below, Nick Matzke answers the second of our three questions.
History--old-fashioned, document-based, interpretive history--is a field that is ripe for an infusion of new methods and technology. Much as the biosphere and the organisms in it have evolved, individuals, documents, schools of thought, and cultures evolve. So far this is not a new idea, but what is novel is the mass digitization of print libraries. Just as we can search the web now, we are increasingly able to search back through the whole corpus of print media ever published - books, journals, magazines, newspapers, etc., sometimes going back hundreds of years.
With all of this material digitized, it becomes much more accessible to semi-automated and quantitative analysis. In addition to the traditional historical method of reading as much of the relevant material as possible, and constructing an interpretation, we now have the possibility of subjecting some historical hypotheses to empirical assessment, or possibly even statistical test. Here is a random example of how this might work: Creationists claim that Darwin and his theory of evolution were important causative factors in the origins of Hitler and the atrocities of the Nazis. Mostly this argument should be summarily dismissed under Godwin's Law, but the fact that "war for existence" rhetoric is common in Hitler's speeches, and the fact that the Nazis took some inspiration from the eugenics policies of western democracies, lends it some initial plausibility. Creationists have played the connection for all it's worth, and responsible historians have debunked them, but annoyingly, the argument seems to come down to subjective assertions about the relative influence of sources A, B, and C on historical actors X, Y, and Z.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could make some quantitative estimate of the various influences on Hitler? Who does he cite, quote or paraphrase in his writings and speeches, and how much? How does Darwin rank, compared to, say, composer Richard Wagner, or the Darwin-rejecting race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose funeral Hitler attended? If such estimation methods were available, we could apply them to other historical figures as well as "experimental controls" - e.g., Winston Churchill, who apparently read Darwin in his youth, became an agnostic as a result, and went on to save western civilization from Hitler.
I'm not going to be the typical naïve arrogant scientist and proclaim the forthcoming takeover of another formerly fuzzy discipline by exact methods. Traditional history will always remain crucial. But what I will call "docuinformatics," inspired by bioinformatics and the methods of evolutionary phylogenetics, should become a useful tool for historians in the future.
