History of Events, Historicism, Causality
The traditional –and for a long time obsolete– perception of history as an unbroken chain of events, phenomena and relationships culminated and in the 19th century came into conflict with the recognition of man as a historical subject. The consequences of this change led to the inescapable relativity of historical finitude and the development of historicism, which always presupposes a philosophy or, at least, a methodology for interpreting the historical events. Continuously developing and conflicting forms of these perceptions have governed historical articulation so far and are limited, to a large or small extend, by an ontological relationship of one-directional temporality, causality. On the practical level of implementation, in this case the creation of digital works of historical content, these trends have consequences starting with the selection of their themes, moving on to the organization of the cognitive material, run through the textual and are expressed with their visual material and influence the width and the direction of their links ( internal and external ). 

A different approach is microhistory. The work of a scholar or a sculptor, the art of olive industry in a village, or the activity of a charitable association, the travels of a family, are only some of the examples of the microhistorical approach. These elements allow “multiple” historical narrations, more “ pasts ” are interweaved, more forms of sequences are recorded, the part and the individual are organically related to the general and the social, while at the same time a lot of different dimensions of man’s and society’s life, that lead to a readjustment of the scientist’s tools.

Macrohistory

Almost exactly in opposition, macrohistory, without ignoring the vigorous mobility of political history, follows mainly the slower movements that characterize the material civilization and the world of perceptions. Behind the short duration history, such as the history of governments, wars and plagues, we see the outline of longue durée history, almost immobile, like the one of sea routes and commerce, the development of metallurgy, land owing, the fragile balance between hunger and the necessity of land, or between population growth and spatial expansion, to mention some random examples. Modern historical approaches aim at answering questions like: what are the forms of cultural continuity and discontinuity, what is the stratigraphy of the events, what kind of causal relationships and durations can be detected, what criteria of periodicity should be adopted, what kind of relationship systems should be promoted (hierarchy, domination, escalation, strict determinism, cyclic causality). For the purposes of an analysis of this type the traditional tools of historical science are not adequate and one should resort to methodological standards processed by all the Humanities or even by natural sciences.