Laboratories of Community: How Digital Humanities Can Further New European Integration History

Abstract

It has been said that media is an important but mostly overlooked player in European integration history. Now, the mass digitisation of newspapers and the introduction of new digital techniques promise great potential to remedy this inattention. With the conjecture that people are drivers and carriers of change, we propose a people-centric approach to mine news articles in a way that can be most useful to further historical research. In this paper, we describe a methodology for building social networks from unstructured news stories, with the European integration scenario serving as a case study.