Capturing Europe in Digital Sources: New Approaches for European Integration History?

Over the last decades, calls to “provincialise” the historiography of Europe have shaped the historiographical debate and led to new perspectives on the history of European integration (Patel 2018, François and Serrier, 2017). Digital approaches might offer historians the opportunity to do just that. With the digitisation of historical materials, such as the press, historians may broaden the scope of the classical source corpus in European historiography, by relying for instance on keyword search and collecting an ample range of press articles dealing with Europe, as Florian Greiner did in 2014. To provide another example, Frédéric Clavert in his project UNSURE resorted to digitally born archives of newsgroups to analyse the discussions on Europe in the 1990s-2000s, to shed light on the opposition to the European integration outside of mass media. These examples display significant efforts to meet the challenges of European integration historiography and led us to invite young researchers and PhD students to share their research using digitised/digital sources or digital tools on European integration history: How can the digitisation of sources and digital tools help face the challenge of ‘capturing Europe’?