ABSTRACT
We often complain that the Internet and online sources have produced a flood of information so enormous that it threatens to drown the historian. Critics write about information overload, glut, fatigue, and anxiety in a universe of what author David Foster Wallace called “total noise.” But the new universe also produces meaningful signals that the historian can search for, and interpret, to the benefit of the craft of history. Falsehoods abound on the Internet. But so does the peer review process that can refute them. The very idea that history is information can stimulate historians to rethink the past. And the information age itself is already becoming the object of historical study and research.
