Christine Bartlitz & Michael Homberg

Digital Inequalities

A Collection of Sources on the History of the Digital Age. Introduction

Digitalisation is one of the defining features of the twenty-first century, and it undoubtedly constitutes one of the most striking characteristics of our present age. This digital present, however, has a long history that remains largely unexplored. Since the 1950s, computers have become a global phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, economic, environmental and political implications. Since its nascent beginnings, the computer has been seen as a powerful machine capable of unleashing a revolutionary force that could transform society, inspiring euphoria and fear in equal amounts.1 In recent years, historical research has increasingly focused on the changes brought about by the dawning computer age, particularly with regard to the interplay between digital and social change.

From a twenty-first-century perspective, we can look back and see the changes brought about by new digital technologies as the rise of a ‘digital society’.2 According to its founding myths, this society is based on the emancipatory use of technology, universal access and new forms of interactivity. This ‘Californian ideology’ remains influential to this day.3 Contrary to all the utopian dreams associated with the ‘computer revolution’, however, it has also rapidly developed its own hierarchies, erected new digital walls and created new digital divides.4

Up to now, research has focused primarily on the history of the computerisation of everyday life and the workplace in the industrialised centres that we now refer to as the Global North. Dominant narratives that remain influential to this day often revolve around brilliant inventors and visionary entrepreneurs in Europe and the US, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Konrad Zuse. Yet it is precisely these revolutionary stories of progress and success – particularly those from Silicon Valley – that obscure the significance of the people behind the opaque process of digital transformation.

If we look beyond the stories of Silicon Valley, we find numerous marginalised actors. These include the ‘ghost workers’ who today train artificial intelligence and moderate social media content; the miners who, by extracting rare earths, provide the material basis for the production of digital hardware; the clickworkers and warehouse staff in the logistics sector; and the employees who provide IT services in call centres and back offices. We encounter them all around the globe – and particularly in the Global South.5 Many work in the cloud, a digital factory whose ethereal façade makes us forget that there is still a great deal of physical, manual labour behind the process we call ‘digitalisation’.6 A digital history that sheds light on these darker aspects can contribute to societal reflection on current issues.

The spread of digital technologies contributed to the cross-border ‘migration of people, circulation of goods [and] mobility of ideas’ in the twentieth century.7 Recent research, which analyses the history of the computer within broader historical trajectories, also makes it possible to identify the dynamics of change, continuities and ruptures that become apparent in global contexts – such as the Cold War or the political upheavals after 1990 – as well as in local contexts. The contributions to this volume thus illustrate the complex interplay between global trends and local, as well as national, developmental dynamics.8

Despite persistently popular claims of clear-cut turning points, the changes of the digital age, as recent studies show, were, over the longue durée, largely evolutionary and gradual. Thus, digitalisation was characterised by various dynamic, wave-like surges: around the mid-1950s, thanks to the emergence of civilian mainframe computers; towards the end of the 1970s, which was marked by microchips and PCs; in the early 1990s, with the spread of the World Wide Web; or in the 2000s, when smart mobile devices began to gain ground and ‘social media’ started to take over the internet. In recent years – which some are already hailing as the ‘AI era’ – a new phase of accelerated change has begun.9

The articles in this compendium of sources illustrate how digital (computer) technologies have transformed both working life and private daily life around the globe. At the same time, they explore how socio-structural markers and forms of capital – social background, education, economic resources, place of residence, gender, age – have shaped access to and the use of digital technologies, and how these characteristics have, in turn, influenced the design of digital technologies. This examines where and why digital transformation has acted as a structural reinforcer of existing social inequalities and political hierarchies, and when new inequalities have emerged.

Computers initiated changes; however, their use was also an expression of specific problems that can be situated historically. For this reason, the study also – and in particular – examines the powerful dynamics of participation and exclusion from the new ‘digital society’.10 A multidimensional approach to understanding ‘digital inequalities’11 must, in addition to addressing access to technology, also examine the varying levels of technical know-how, divergent usage patterns and the differing effects of technology, whilst taking into account national, societal and cultural contexts.12

Such a perspective on digital inequalities involves examining the ambivalences and asynchronies of digital transformation, which become particularly apparent within a global framework. Thus, on a larger scale, the current triumph of the tech empires is linked to new forms of digital colonialism. Yet even when we zoom in to the micro-level, we can observe practices of inclusion and exclusion. The formation of digital communities on the World Wide Web13 , for example, simultaneously gave rise to new ‘geographies of exclusion’ in virtual space.14 For this reason alone – alongside top-down narratives of planning – social-historical perspectives, and in particular ‘stories from below’ that focus on people living on the ‘digital peripheries’,15 offer enormous research potential, for instance regarding the creative use of digital technologies, or the forms of resistance to the process of digital transformation.

After all, stories of digital inequalities – beyond the dynamics of social hierarchisation outlined above – are always political stories in that they address the relationship between states and citizens; the digital surveying and administration of the population have shaped the digital age just as much as citizens’ increasing participation in historical developments. If we follow Frank Bösch, there is much to suggest that contemporary history could also be described as the ‘age of co-posters and the digitally recorded’16. However, the state – which, through the use of digital technologies, has both catalysed processes of social change and contributed to surveillance, control or even repression – was never neutral.17 Thus, unbroken optimistic narratives of a ‘digital modernity’ obscure the persistence of algorithmic biases, behind which – in public authorities as well as in digital corporations – concrete people and their worlds of imagination are always concealed.18

The contributions to this collection of sources aim to demonstrate that the social changes brought about by computers since the 1950s constitute a turning point in history that has also had a biographical impact. Despite its immense relevance to everyday life, the topic of digitalisation has so far played a surprisingly marginal role in historical and political education, as well as in most school curricula. The individual highlights in this collection may therefore also contribute to establishing the history of digitalisation in both school and university contexts. The authors seek to lend historical depth to current developments in order to reveal path dependencies and contingencies, actor-driven interests, as well as the shifting dynamics of discourses, practices and economies – and thus to write a ‘history related to problems of the present.’19

About this book

The contributions in this collection of sources are intended to break new ground in digital history—not only empirically, but also methodologically and conceptually. We therefore regard this publication as a showcase for demonstrating how new formats of digital publishing can be developed from within the historical research process. The following questions have guided us in this endeavour: How can digital publishing be further developed, particularly through the use of digital methods? How can new narrative and multimedia formats be designed that systematically incorporate digitally available (audiovisual) sources and research data? How can research be portrayed even more strongly as a transparent process which, particularly in the pursuit of democratic resilience, contributes to the traceability and credibility of science in the spirit of Open Science? And how can authors and developers collaborate fruitfully, in the face of new questions of digital ethics and whilst taking into account principles of sustainability?

Over the past few decades, digitalisation has not only given rise to entirely new types of sources through which the history of the digital age can be told, but has also opened up new possibilities for presenting these sources digitally. In close and highly constructive collaboration with the IT developers Arno Schlipf and Frederike Heinitz, we have therefore developed publication formats based on the researchers’ source work and jointly explored best practices.20 We would like to thank all our colleagues involved, including – especially – those in the archives who have embraced this experiment.

This collection of sources is aimed, on the one hand, at researchers in contemporary history – a discipline whose research practice increasingly reflects the fact that our modern societies are becoming ever more permeated by digital media. Secondly, we aim to spark interest in the topic amongst a wider public – particularly lecturers in the education sector, but also students – and thereby encourage new ways of teaching digital history in higher education and political education.

This compendium has been published on the Diamond Open Access platform of the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (ZZF). zdbooks.de aims to contribute to the development of decentralised infrastructures in the field of contemporary history, with a view to establishing a modern academic communication infrastructure that does not burden either authors or users with publication costs. We therefore view this project as a contribution to strengthening the diversity of scholar-led publishing initiatives within the field of history – in line with the Alliance of German Science Organisations.21 In this way, scholar-led publishing infrastructures open up new opportunities to strengthen digital sovereignty within the discipline and beyond.22 Publishing is understood here as a social and collaborative process, with the aim of portraying historical research more strongly as a dynamic and discursive process.23

Academic publishing has undergone fundamental changes in recent years in social, technological and institutional terms. In practice, however, the monograph and the prestigious specialist article – as the outcome of lengthy research processes – continue to dominate the field of history.24 In contrast to the social sciences, however, there are very few published interim findings that make the knowledge-building process more transparent and allow colleagues as well as a wider public to participate in the development of research findings. Internal discussions, working papers and other formats ‘which, rather than presenting a polished research question, can proactively address the authors’ positions, perspectives and individual lines of inquiry’25 , and which demonstrate an openness to the unexpected, extending even to the ‘art of failure’26 , remain rare. The citation of sources and research data used is also largely uncommon, apart from in relevant editions. The current publication culture in historical studies is not geared towards this.27 New forms of academic publishing therefore also mean helping to initiate a cultural shift within historical studies.28 This is where our source compendium comes in.

Currently, voices are growing louder29 that view the standardised publication of research findings in a publishing landscape dominated by a handful of market leaders as a decline in ‘bibliodiversity’ and an impoverishment of public discourse – and this at a time when previously marginalised sections of society are also demanding their share of ‘history’.30 In the academic world, the number of scholar-led publishing initiatives is growing, a trend that can also be explained by criticism of monopolistic publishing structures controlled by a handful of large, globally active publishers.31 Yet we know from research into ‘digital history’ that ‘digital processes […] often reproduce existing forms of exclusion and invisibility, whether through technical standards, linguistic barriers, bias in data, or epistemic assumptions in tools, metadata standards or interfaces’. Consequently, access to infrastructure and the handling of data are ‘increasingly recognised as political, cultural and commercial lines of conflict’.32

In this respect, we also hope that this publication will help to reduce digital inequalities in the field of digital publishing. In doing so, the issue of environmental responsibility in digital practices, in light of the climate crisis, should also be taken into account.33 The digital applications featured in this compendium were therefore assessed according to criteria such as energy consumption in dynamic applications, as well as principles of transparency and digital self-sufficiency – for instance, in the use of AI applications not developed by US tech firms. The aim was to reconcile innovative digital publishing – in terms of the usability and visual aesthetics of the contributions – with the desired reduction in resource consumption.34

Following on from Andreas Fickers’ thesis that ‘digital infrastructures, tools and “sources” today have a central influence on how we conceive, research and narrate history’,35 this compendium presents a wide range of sources on the history of the digital age, such as archive documents, websites, images, videos, radio programmes, etc. To this end, we combine qualitative insights with the findings of data-driven research – and explore how our perspective on events changes as we begin to zoom in and out between the micro and macro levels.36 In the case of web history, connections between web pages can be identified through network analysis and, as in the case of the article on private homepages, visualised and interpreted using the open-source programme Gephi.37 Decisions regarding data cleaning, attribution and modelling, however, have an impact on the analytical process and the interpretative value of the digital visualisation. Furthermore, the web recording of a Wikipedia page on the topic of ‘Cyberspace’ bears witness to the dynamism and transience of web content in the 2000s.38

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AI-supported speech-to-text analyses, as well as image and person recognition in the academic process, are tested using video sources as examples, including in the contributions on the history of computer dating, the computerisation of border controls in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s, and the use of computers in schools or within the Evangelical Church. In addition, we are exploring new forms of presenting and structuring documents, such as page-by-page navigation and layers, to enable us to annotate sources and highlight them visually. Furthermore, we are incorporating elements of digital storytelling into the articles to gain a practical understanding of the impact on narrative, the value of insights and the communication of knowledge.

With the historicisation of the digital age, research is thus turning its focus to a period in which digitally born data39 are becoming the subject of research and the central source base for contemporary historical studies, giving rise to new questions. This is accompanied by a re-conceptualisation of contemporary history, which also has methodological implications, as new forms of source criticism and ‘digital hermeneutics’ (Andreas Fickers) must now be developed in line with research into ‘Digital History’.40 By combining the exploration of the history of the digital age with the investigation of digital methods, the collection consistently reflects on digital history in its dual meaning as both a subject of research and a research method.

translated by Lee Holt

Footnotes

  1. 1
    To some, the computer appeared to be a panacea and a universal tool for emancipation; to others, it was a machine for rationalisation and surveillance, a job-killer, or even a symbol of isolation in atomised societies. Since the 1970s, the German-American computer pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum has been counted amongst the most influential critics of contemporary technological apologetics. See generally Claus Pias (ed.), Zukünfte des Computers, Zurich 2005; Frank Bösch, ‘Euphorie und Ängste: westliche Vorstellungen einer computerisierten Welt, 1945-1990’, in: Lucian Hölscher (ed.), Die Zukunft des 20. Jahrhunderts. Dimensionen einer historischen Zukunftsforschungq, Frankfurt am Main 2017, pp. 221–252; Dick van Lente (ed.), Prophets of Computing: Visions of Society Transformed by Computing, New York 2022.
  2. 2
    Frank Bösch (ed.), Wege in die digitale Gesellschaft. Computernutzung in der Bundesrepublik 1955–1990, Göttingen 2018, online https://www.zeitgeschichte-digital.de/doks/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/2642/file/boesch_hg._wege_in_die_digitale_gesellschaft_gesamt_2018_de.pdf [20 April 2026]. All internet resources (URLs) cited in this volume were accessed and verified by us on 20 April 2026; we therefore do not specify the date of access for each one in the following. Daniela Zetti/David Gugerli, ‘Digitale Gesellschaft, in: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, 21 October 2018, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/055503/2018-10-21/; Ricky Wichum/Daniela Zetti (eds.), Zur Geschichte des digitalen Zeitalters, Wiesbaden 2022; Joy Lisi Rankin, A People’s History of Computing in the United States, Cambridge, MA 2018.
  3. 3
    Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Chicago 2006; Michael Friedewald, ‘Computer Power to the People! Die Versprechungen der Computer-Revolution, 1968–1973’, in: kommunikation@gesellschaft 8 (2007), pp. 1–18, online at https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/12702/B9_2007_Friedewald.pdf. For a critique of this narrative, see Michael Homberg, Digitale Unabhängigkeit. Indiens Weg ins Computerzeitalter – eine internationale Geschichte, Göttingen 2022; Payal Arora, The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West, Cambridge, MA 2019, p. 78; Gabriele Balbi, The Digital Revolution. A Short History of an Ideology, Oxford 2023.
  4. 4
    Thomas S. Mullaney et al. (eds.), Your Computer is On Fire, Cambridge, MA 2021; Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick (eds.), Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society, Baltimore, MD 2022. See also the work of the research group ‘Digital Inequalities. Divides, Hierarchies, and Boundaries in Germany, 1970s to 1990s’ at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, https://digital-inequalities.com.
  5. 5
    Moritz Altenried, The Digital Factory. The Human Labour of Automation, Chicago 2022, p. 5. See also Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work. How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, New York 2019; Lisa Nakamura et al., Technoprecarious, Cambridge, MA 2020; Ingo Dachwitz and Sven Hilbig, Digitaler Kolonialismus. Wie Tech-Konzerne und Großmächte die Welt unter sich aufteilen, Munich 2025.
  6. 6
    Nathan Ensmenger, ‘The Cloud is a Factory’, in: Mullaney et al. (eds.), Your Computer is On Fire, pp. 29–50; ibid., ‘The Environmental History of Computing’, in: Technology and Culture 59 (2018), no. 4: Suppl., pp. S7–S33, online https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/nensmeng/files/Ensmenger2018.pdf; Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud, Cambridge, MA 2015.
  7. 7
    Jürgen Osterhammel, Weltgeschichte und Gegenwartsdiagnose, Münster 2013, p. 37. See also Michael Homberg, Mensch | Mikrochip. Die Globalisierung der Arbeitswelten in der Computerindustrie 1960 bis 2000 – Fragen, Perspektiven, Thesen, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 66 (2018), no. 2, pp. 267–293, online https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/2018_2.pdf.
  8. 8
    See also Stefanie Büchner/Jannis Hergesell/Jannis Kallinikos, ‘Digital Transformation(s). On the Entanglement of Long-Term Processes and Digital Social Change; An Introduction’, in: Historical Social Research 47 (2022), no. 3, pp. 7–39, online https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.47.2022.25; Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi, A New History of Modern Computing, Cambridge, MA 2021.
  9. 9
    David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, London 2008; Martina Heßler and Nora Thorade, ‘Die Vierteilung der Vergangenheit. Eine Kritik des Begriffs Industrie 4.0’, in: Technikgeschichte 86 (2019), no. 2, pp. 153–170; Frank Bösch, ‘Perspektiven der Zeitgeschichte im digitalen Zeitalter’, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 72 (2024), no. 2, pp. 346–361, here pp. 348ff. On the history of social media, see also the recent work by Martin Schmitt: ‘Alles geht? Die jüngste Geschichte der »sozialen Medien». Zwischen Wirtschaft und Gemeinschaft, in: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: Soziale Medien, 1 March 2024, https://www.bpb.de/themen/medien-journalismus/soziale-medien/545767/alles-geht-die-juengste-geschichte-der-sozialen-medien/.
  10. 10
    Jan van Dijk, The Digital Divide, Cambridge 2020; Laura Robinson et al., ‘Digital Inequalities and why they Matter’, in: Information, Communication & Society 18 (2015), no. 5, pp. 569–582.
  11. 11
    Thomas N. Friemel et al., ‘Multidimensional Digital Inequalities’, in: Weizenbaum Journal for the Digital Society 1 (2021), no. 1, https://ojs.weizenbaum-institut.de/index.php/wjds/article/view/1_1_3/31; Alexander van Deursen and Ellen Helsper, ‘The Third Level Digital Divide: Who Benefits Most from Being Online’, in: Communication and Information Technologies Annual 10 (2015), pp. 29–52; Chris Piallat (ed.), Der Wert der Digitalisierung. Gemeinwohl in der digitalen Welt, Bielefeld 2021, https://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/pdf/3d/91/9e/oa9783839456590.pdf. On the history of digital divides, see also Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, Cambridge, MA 2021.
  12. 12
    Current research shows that – even in the case of universal access – further inequalities can be observed, for example when algorithmic decision-making systems reproduce existing power structures and discrimination. See, for example, the recent work by Meredith Broussard, More than a Glitch. Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, Cambridge, MA 2023; Alexander Monea, The Digital Closet. How the Internet Became Straight, Cambridge, MA 2022; Halcyon M. Lawrence, ‘Siri Disciplines’, in: Mullaney et al. (eds.), Your Computer is On Fire, pp. 179–198.
  13. 13
    Andreas Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne, Berlin 2017, pp. 225–271.
  14. 14
    Mark Graham and Martin Dittus, Geographies of Digital Exclusion: Data and Inequality, London 2022, available online at https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/9781786807410-2.pdf.
  15. 15
    S. Craig Watkins et al., *The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality*, New York 2018. For a similar approach, see also David Nemer, Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil, Cambridge, MA 2022.
  16. 16
    Bösch, Perspektiven der Zeitgeschichte im digitalen Zeitalter, p. 350. On the background to this phenomenon, see Michael Homberg, Der Staat, der Bürger und das Geheimnis. ‘Blowing the Whistle!’ – Medien und Moral in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren, in: Birgit Hofmann (ed.), Menschenrecht als Nachricht. Medien, Öffentlichkeit und Moral seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main/New York 2020, pp. 381–410.
  17. 17
    See Elke Seefried, ‘Steuerung der Informationsgesellschaft? Digitale Ordnungspolitik in zeithistorischer Perspektive’, in: List-Forum für Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitik 50 (2024), nos. 1–2, pp. 31–50; Bösch, Perspektiven der Zeitgeschichte, pp. 350–352; pp. 356–358; Samuel Greef, Staat und Staatlichkeit im digitalen Zeitalter, Bielefeld 2023, online at https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7065-3/staat-und-staatlichkeit-im-digitalen-zeitalter/.
  18. 18
    In addition to the state’s data collection, the activities of digital corporations in particular have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. See Shoshana Zuboff, Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus, Frankfurt am Main 2018. On the role of algorithms, see Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, New York 2016; Safiya U. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, New York 2018; Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, New York 2018; Wendy Chun, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighbourhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, Cambridge, MA 2021. For a social and cultural history of the computer industry in the English-speaking world, see Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing, Cambridge, MA 2012; Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing, Cambridge, MA 2017; Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers and the Politics of Technical Expertise, Cambridge, MA 2010.
  19. 19
    Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom. Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970, Göttingen 2012, p. 25. On the concept of a ‘history related to problems of the present’, see Hans Günter Hockerts: Zeitgeschichte in Deutschland. Concept, Methods, Thematic Areas, in: Historisches Jahrbuch 113 (1993), pp. 98–127, online https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4659/1/4659.pdf.
  20. 20
    For information on collaboration with IT experts and the principles of software development, see the objectives of the RSE community: https://de-rse.org/de/index.html.
  21. 21
    ‘The overarching goal is the sustainable financing of professional, high-quality, not-for-profit, scholar-led Open Access infrastructures that are attractive to researchers working at German institutions.’ Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service, German Research Foundation, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, German Rectors’ Conference, Leibniz Association, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Max Planck Society, German Science and Humanities Council, ‘The Alliance’s Strategy for the Further Development of Academic Publishing 2026–2030’, in: Zenodo, 29 July 2025, p. 8, https://zenodo.org/records/15853295.
  22. 22
    Ibid., p. 5.
  23. 23
    On this aspiration, see also the statements by the co-founders of the Swiss publisher intercom: ‘Selber machen’: Historiker:innen als Verleger:innen?!, in: H-Soz-Kult podcast ‘Vergangenheitsformen’, 28 March 2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/podcast/staffel-3/selber-machen-historiker-als-verleger.
  24. 24
    ‘The field of history is a conservative publishing environment in which established publication channels are favoured.’ This is the finding of a study by the BMBF-funded collaborative project open-access.network: Anna-Karina Renziehausen/Jesko Rücknagel/Helene Strauß (2023), Wahrnehmung von Open Access: Erhebung zu Anforderungen und Hindernissen in ausgewählten geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen. Geschichtswissenschaften und Soziale Arbeit (1.0). Zenodo, Jan. 2023, p. 14, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7540764.
  25. 25
    See David Kuchenbuch, ‘Wie findet und formuliert man eine gute historische Frage?’, in: Zeitgeschichte-online, December 2022, https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen/david-kuchenbuch-teil-5-wie-findet-und-formuliert-man-eine-gute-historische-frage.
  26. 26
    Annette Schuhmann, ‘Wissenschaft heißt, Unsicherheit erzeugen, nicht Bekanntes zu reproduzieren. Ein Interview mit Andreas Fickers’, in: Zeitgeschichte-online, November 2021, https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/interview/wissenschaft-heisst-unsicherheit-erzeugen-nicht-bekanntes-zu-reproduzieren.
  27. 27
    See, amongst others, the assessment by intercom Verlag: Gegenwissen: Epilogue: About cache, https://cache.ch/gegenwissen/epilog/aboutcache/montagem, p. V1/2; Special issue of traverse 29 (2022), no. 1: Publishing in the Humanities, https://revue-traverse.ch/ausgabe/2022-1/. See also the thought-provoking text by Mareike König, ‘Finished – for now. ‘Fertig – vorerst. Unfertigkeit als epistemischer Wert in den digitalen Geisteswissenschaften’, in: Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften 11 (2026), DOI 10.17175/2026_002.
  28. 28
    See Renziehausen/Rücknagel/Strauß, ‘Wahrnehmung von Open Access’.
  29. 29
    See, as an example of the wide range of statements: Alexander von Humboldt Foundation et al., ‘The Alliance’s Strategy for the Further Development of Academic Publishing 2026–2030’.
  30. 30
    See, amongst others, the following recent article: Petra Gehring, ‘Shining Diamond? Zum Publizieren bei Bibliotheken als Ausweg aus der Krise des wissenschaftlichen Publikationssystems’, in Merkur 80 (2026), no. 920 (January), pp. 20–32, https://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/artikel/shining-diamond-a-mr-80-1-20/, as well as the responses to it: Diethard Tauts, ‘Diamond ist die Antwort. Die gegenwärtige Krise des wissenschaftlichen Publikationssystems kann überwunden werden’, Merkur Blog, 30 January 2026, https://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/2026/01/30/diamond-ist-die-antwort-die-gegenwaertige-krise-des-wissenschaftlichen-publikationssystems-kann-ueberwunden-werden/; Björn Brembs, ‘Lange wurde über die »Krise des wissenschaftlichen Publikationssystems« debattiert – jetzt sind Entscheidungen fällig,’ in: Merkur Blog, 18 February 2026, https://www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/2026/01/30/diamond-ist-die-antwort-die-gegenwaertige-krise-des-wissenschaftlichen-publikationssystems-kann-ueberwunden-werden/.
  31. 31
    See Consortium ScholarLed, https://scholarled.org/; Collective of authors, The scholar-led.network Manifesto, July 2021, https://graphite.page/scholar-led-manifest/.
  32. 32
    König, Fertig – vorerst, sections [1]–[69], here [11].
  33. 33
    See, amongst others, the Greening DH working group of the Association for Digital Humanities in the German-speaking World (Verband Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V.): website https://dhd-greening.github.io/.
  34. 34
    The Research Data Alliance and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance have published the FAIR (2016) and CARE (2019) principles for this purpose: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618, https://www.gida-global.org/care.
  35. 35
    Andreas Fickers, ‘Update für die Hermeneutik. Geschichtswissenschaft auf dem Weg zur digitalen Forensik?’, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, online edition, 17 (2020), no. 1, https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-1765.
  36. 36
    Florentina Armaselu and Andreas Fickers (eds.), Zoomland. Exploring Scale in Digital History and Humanities, Berlin/Boston 2023, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/87877.
  37. 37
    See Richard Rogers, Doing Digital Methods, London 2024; Niels Brügger, ‘When the Present Web is Later the Past. Web Historiography, Digital History and Internet Studies’, in: Historical Social Research 37 (2012), no. 4, pp. 102–117, online https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.37.2012.4.102-117.
  38. 38
    According to various studies, the average lifespan of a web page after the turn of the millennium was just 3 years. Between 2001 and 2013, more than 90 per cent of the approximately 10 million web pages examined disappeared completely. See Junghoo Cho and Hector Garcia-Molina, The Evolution of the Web and Implications for an Incremental Crawler, Stanford 1999; Teru Agata et al., ‘Life Span of Web Pages: A Survey of 10 Million Pages Collected in 2001’, in: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Piscataway 2014, pp. 463–464. See also Niels Brügger, The Archived Web. Doing History in the Digital Age, Cambridge, MA 2018, pp. 75ff.
  39. 39
    See, for example, Melanie Althage, Moritz Feichtinger and Anna Siebold, Theoretische Grundlagen einer digitalen Quellenkritik, Living Handbook »Digitale Quellenkritik«, in: Zenodo, 29 July 2024, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12647879; Ian Milligan, Averting the Digital Dark Age. How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web as a Memory, Baltimore 2024; Malte Thießen, Zum ersten Mal digital. E-Mails als Quellen zur Zeitgeschichte des 21. Jahrhunderts, in: Christine G. Krüger/Franziska Meifort/Mareike Witkowski (eds.), Korrespondenzen aus der Vergangenheit. Briefe als historische Quellen, Göttingen 2025, pp. 255–263; ibid., Die sozialsten aller Quellen. Social Media als Quellen für eine Zeitgeschichte des 21. Jahrhunderts, in: Mia Berg/Andrea Lorenz/Kristin Oswald (eds.), Geschichte auf Instagram und TikTok. Perspektiven auf Quellen und Praktiken, Berlin 2025, pp. 107–132, https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/9783111360874-005/html.
  40. 40
    Fickers, ‘Update für die Hermeneutik’; Simone Lässig, ‘Digital History: Challenges and Opportunities for the Profession’, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 47 (2021), no. 1, pp. 5–34; Torsten Hiltmann, ‘Vom Medienwandel zum Methodenwandel. Die fortschreitende Digitalisierung und ihre Konsequenzen für die Geschichtswissenschaften in historischer Perspektive’, in: Karoline Döring et al. (eds.), Digital History. Konzepte, Methoden und Kritiken Digitaler Geschichtswissenschaft, Berlin/Boston 2022, pp. 13–44; ibid., (Epistemologische) Grundlagen in der Anwendung digitaler Methoden, in: Christina Antenhofer/Christoph Kühberger/Arno Strohmeyer (eds.), Digital Humanities in der Geschichtswissenschaft, Vienna 2024, pp. 43–60; Sarah-Mai Dang et al. (eds.), Doing Digital Film History. Concepts, Tools, Practices, Berlin/Boston 2025, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111082486.

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