The significance of this research, “Questions and Sources of the Contemporary Historian: The Case of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” stems from the major challenges facing historians of the present time. These challenges are embodied in the overwhelming density of events and the multiplicity of sources, particularly during major crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The historian today is no longer confronted with a limited set of written documents or traditional archives alone; rather, they must engage with massive amounts of digital data, oral testimonies, images, video recordings, and the continuous stream of news circulating on social media platforms.

This research seeks to answer several pressing questions, most notably:

What are the sources available for studying the present, and how should historians deal with them?

What types of questions can contemporary historians raise, particularly in the context of COVID-19?

What role can they play in providing scientific knowledge that helps societies to understand and recover?

The study demonstrates that the notion of the “document” has expanded significantly. It now includes official archives (government and organizational records), oral memory (testimonies of doctors and patients), digital sources (social media platforms, news, images, and videos), and collective mentalities (how people thought and behaved under fear).

At the same time, the research highlights key methodological challenges. Information abundance can easily turn into informational chaos if not carefully filtered. Eyewitness testimonies often carry subjectivity and bias, yet they reveal essential dimensions of human experience. Fear and anxiety, meanwhile, generate a form of collective memory that may overshadow factual reality. In such circumstances, the historian must balance scientific rigor with human sensitivity.

Finally, the study concludes that several emerging approaches can assist in understanding the present: psychological and social history for exploring fear and anxiety; the history of fear as a recurring human phenomenon; global and connected history for examining how societies collectively faced the pandemic; and the method of variables for analyzing the transformations triggered by COVID-19 in politics, society, and the economy.