Genuine Internetdaten als historische Quellen – Entwurf einer korrealistischen Quellentheorie

Although the “virtual heritage” has become an important topic in scientific and political discussions, the possibility of writing history out of born digital sources has been neglected in historical research for many years. This is supported by the fact that there doesn’t exist any systematic source theory for born digital sources. This paper wants to initiate a discussion on the theory and methodology of genuine digital sources by discussing the potentials and problems of digital source analyses. The paper furthermore reflects on the question, whether born digital sources need to be handled as a separate source category, or whether – so the hypothesis of the correalist source theo- ry - they don’t differ from other sources in their material and documentary characteristics, but only in the visibility of their multidimensional, processual and multimodal elements which are inherent in every material source as well.