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An interview with museum curator Bodo von Dewitz is presented. Topics of discussion include von Dewitz's doctoral dissertation about World War I photography, the use of photographs as historical sources, and an exhibition curated by von Dewitz on the subject of Soviet political and propaganda photography.

The article discusses the routine daily writing habits and process of author Paul Auster, whose work often features a notebook as a central character or protagonist. A passage is cited from the writer describing his Spartan and isolated work space, his composing longhand one paragraph at a time in a graph-paper notebook before immediately typing the paragraph on a manual typewriter. The author of the article relates Auster's methods to the foregoing interviews in this issue on writing process and thinking processes of historiographers. Also remarked on are musical and visual notation.

An interview is presented with Karl Schlögel, a dean and historian at the European University of Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, whose work has focused on 20th century urban culture in Eastern and Central Europe, and whose book "Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937" describes a catastrophic year of Stalinism. Schlögel remarks on the need for historians to engage their senses in depicting a historical epoch and notes how sentences reflect the character of the writer. He also discusses the textual visualization of history and the problems of overlaying present perceptions on past eras, as well as the value of literature in illuminating history.

An interview is presented with science historian Staggan Müller-Wille, docent in the Department of History at the University of Exeter, who discusses taxonomies and the systematization of the scientific process on the model of Swedish botanist Carl von Linnaeus and the writing excerpt organizing systems of philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Müller-Wille responds to questions about his work in Darwinism and how a writer's philosophy is embedded even in scientific work. Also reflected on is how to tame and condense one's prose particularly in writings for exhibits, and the use of illustration in science writing.

An interview is presented with Philipp Sarasin, author of the book "Darwin und Foucault," which describes the genealogy of the thinking of philosopher Michel Foucault and the evolutionary nature of Foucault's writing. Sarasin responds to questions about whether as he writes he engages in an anticipatory dialogue or argument with his imagined reader. He also muses on the written text as a storage or memory device for an overtaxed consciousness and as an experimental means to learn new things. Sarasin also discusses the role of metaphor in his writing, his writings on bacteriology and anthrax in particular, and his book "Reizbare Maschinen."

The article introduces this special issue of the journal, which is dedicated to the use of images as sources in historical research.

An introduction is presented to this August 2010 issue, which consists of several interviews investigating scholarly writing practices as perceptual processes.