The prospect of on-line archiving holds promises of transforming the writing and perception of history. The speeding up of access to source material and the ease of using database queries to juxtapose textual information will hopefully lead to the formulation of new questions and approaches. The database itself can move from the domain of purely preparatory research and footnotes to the center of historical representation. As a published form, a database is a representational genre, similar to the chronicle or the monograph, and yet different in ways that only now become discernable. The query can become a form that will supplement the narrative, expanding the scope of and raising fascinating questions about historical knowledge by changing the representational form, the mode of reception and the dynamics of the relationship between source material, academic research, and public consumption.
Human life has a particular affinity with the narrative form.