Digitale NS-Geschichtsschreibung. Herausforderungen im Umgang mit digitalen Quellen in der Geschichtsforschung und -vermittlung zum Nationalsozialismus
Digital historiography of National Socialism. Challenges in dealing with digital sources in historical research and communication on National Socialism

Summary/Abstract: Digital sources are becoming increasingly crucial for examining the history of National Socialism. Sources that are no longer ‘only’ stored in paper form in an archive allow new approaches, questions, and presentations of results in both research and teaching. The results may vary from digital 3D reconstructions, such as virtual or augmented reality, through Twitter hashtags, to online exhibitions. This article focuses, from a historiographical perspective, on the advantages and the challenges of this change from the analogue to the digital. It examines current projects that illustrate how researchers, memorial sites, and archives are addressing the ethical and moral issues surrounding the topic – such as those of open access and personal rights – and how they are organizing access to information. In addition to digitized sources about National Socialism – for example, scanned documents with metadata – genuinely digital sources are also discussed. These include holograms of eyewitnesses or visualizations of spatial history. Through this analysis it becomes clear that the classical techniques for source criticism used by historians prepares them well for digital approaches in research and teaching.

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