Has the coronavirus pandemic changed historiography?

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed historiography mainly in that historians now analyze far more everyday documents like social media posts, chat histories, and personal blogs to document the pandemic - that wasn't possible before. At the same time, the focus has shifted: it's not just about major political decisions, but also about personal experiences of ordinary people and how they lived through that time. Some historians are also writing about current events much faster than they used to, rather than waiting decades until everything has been processed.

I think you need to differentiate here. Sure, social media and private documents are more important to historians today, but that's not really anything new - Corona didn't invent that. Historians have been dealing with everyday sources for a long time, analyzing diaries and evaluating private letters. What Corona really did was speed up the rate at which history gets written. We've already gotten books, documentaries, and academic papers while the pandemic was still happening. That's pretty unusual.

What actually changed is the volume and nature of the real-time data available. There are videos from everywhere, millions of tweets, TikToks, Discord chats - the material is so massive that historians can't even process it all. That raises new questions: How do you choose what to include? What's representative? And where are the people who weren't online? That's a real methodological challenge that Corona made urgent.

Plus, the pandemic showed that history no longer only gets created in archives. Everyone documented it, whether intentionally or not. That makes historiography more democratic, but also more chaotic.

I'd say the pandemic changed historiography less than it accelerated what was already happening. You're right that digital sources have been relevant for a while, but Corona showed how quickly history gets created in real-time format and how difficult it becomes to find reliable sources later when everything's so fleeting. What's really interesting is that historians are now forced to work much more spontaneously - not digging through archives decades later, but basically being there as it happens. That poses new methodological problems for the discipline.

What struck me is this: With Corona, it suddenly became clear how important it is for historians to document things in real time, not years later. But the problem is that we now have a flood of material and nobody really knows what's actually relevant and what's just noise. With earlier events, historians could at least filter what gets preserved in the first place - with Corona we have everything, and sometimes that makes it harder, not easier, to write the actual history.