EGO – European History as a Transcultural Network

This talk introduces the project “EGO | European History Online” which has been developed and set up by the Leibniz Institute of European History and the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. EGO is a transcultural European history of the Modern Times, focusing on the intercultural exchange beyond borders of state, nation, and culture. The talk will outline the genesis and concept of the project which blends ‘analogue’ research with ‘digital’ writing processes and publication scenarios. The starting point of this work was an ‘analogue’ question: How can one write a history of Europe that does not merely consist of various national histories strung together, the pure enumeration of pan-European structural elements, or a genealogy of developments in the history of the mind? EGO aims at resolving these oppositions by re-defining ‘Europe’ with regard to communicational structures and cultural exchange in order to illustrate the dynamics of what was considered ‘Europe(an)’ in different centuries of the Modern Times. It soon became clear that such a history of European communicational networks and transfer processes could only be realised digitally (or online) and using multimedia. This talk will thus illustrate how content and form are intertwined in EGO and which chances and limits of Digital Humanities can be shown in this project.

All guests are very welcome!