The image as historical source or: grabbing contexts

Abstract

Displaying images on computer screens is one of the more spectacular types of demonstration available. Besides being spectacular, such systems hold, however, quite some promise for the handling of a type of source which by its great variability proved to be quite elusive for formal, but not only for formal analysis in recent years. The author paper tries to summarize recent developments and argues, that the important potential of image processing, as far as research is concerned, is not in the area of retrieving and displaying images, but in improved possibilities for a more intersubjective way of analyzing them.