I read an article recently discussing whether or not the US is headed into another Civil War. That made me think about the sources historians use to study the Civil War today, and whether the most useful kinds of sources, or type of information most helpful for historians in reconstructing events or time periods, may have changed due to technology, especially considering what seems like a glut of information in the internet age.

If historians 150+ years from now were studying the early 21st century, what information, in what format, would be most useful to leave behind for them?

Mods, I suspect this question might be too vague or future-oriented! I was worried about making it too specific to highly charged politics of the moment, when the main thing I’m interested in is what would be useful in the information we’re creating today for the purposes of studying history later on. As in, Twitter is very useful for me today in learning about something that happened across the world an hour ago, but would a historian prefer a journalist’s article a week later, or the comments on that article over the course of years afterward, or whatever the Wikipedia article eventually became after a decade, or a livejournal account from somebody in that location, or emails between informed, interested people sending each other links?

Please let me know if there’s a better subreddit for this question!