Digital urban history: between Historical Information Systems (HIS) and virtual reality

Digital tools and the Internet offer new opportunities to renew our trade as historians. They provide tools to map historical events given that they are an exceptionally well-suited instrument to visualise the nonlinear order by which social memory becomes organized. They also facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, particularly with respect to the field of geography. Moreover, they supply us with an accurate way of disseminating our research at a relatively low cost. This article analyses digital tools specific to the Web 2.0, such as HIS and virtual reality, and addresses how to adapt them to the practice of history. We will review a number of projects. The goal is not to produce an exhaustive inventory, but to give priority to those projects with which we are most familiar, and those in which we have had the opportunity to interview their authors.