Tuesday 5 May: Studying European events: feedback on a pedagogical experiment, Valérie Schafer, C2DH, University of Luxembourg

1. Studying European Events through Web Archives:
Feedback on a Pedagogical Experiment
(Valérie Schafer, C2DH)
Presentation by Yves Maurer and Ben Els

2. Case Studies during the 2 previous years
- Debates on nuclear energy, in particular on the Cattenom
power station
- Cartoons dedicated to Brexit
- Trump, Europe and NATO
- The United Kingdom's relationship with Euro
- European copyright policy and the controversies it has raised within the European Union
- Reactions to the song Don't Deny, presented by Armenia at Eurovision 2015, which, among other things, provoked
quite virulent discussions between Armenians and Turks, as well as debates on the politicisation of songs at
Eurovision.
- A comparison of the websites created during their European Presidencies by the countries themselves or by the
European Urban Knowledge Network.
- Jean-Claude Juncker's electoral strategy in 2004
- The impact on the Web andpolitical reactions following the publication of the pocture of Aylan Kurdi, whose lifeless
body was captured by a photographer on a beach and generated a wave of emotion and awareness of the tragedies
faced by migrants.

3. Strengths, limits, experience
Some limits inherent to the experiment :
- Access to Web archives was limited: IA, UK Web Archives, Web Archives of the Publications Office of the EU
- Analysis by beginners
- Mostly qualitative approach
- Some lack of problematization
But also some successes
- Lot of results within a few hours, which may claim for some kind of datathons or intensive but time-limited effort
- Several approaches, some more related to web archiving
processes, others to the events themselves
- A lot of multimedia studies + Web archives are not
sufficient
- More bottom/up approaches than usual in European
history
https://eurovision.tv/story/armenia-watch-the-video-of-don-t-deny

4. Some proposals
- Select events and start by a rigorous state of the art and a fine knowledge of them /
eventually reduce the event to a specific approach for the qualitative study
- Division of work ?
- Define a process and workflow with precise research questions (which will vary from
one event to the others) & research steps / conduct research through a limited time
and if possible in real time in several places (2 days for example simultaneously in 3-4
Web archives with mixed teams of scholars and archivists + ½ day of feedack)
- Visual studies are key / multimedia studies too
- Mixture of close and distant reading
- Complement with interviews on Web archiving
- A chance for also experimenting new writing formats
- A seminar with students on Digital Europe for 3 semesters : final assignment  write a
research paper