Marianne Backes, Director of the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE), and René Leboutte, Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Luxembourg and holder of the ad personam Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration History, set out the aims of the symposium ‘Websites as sources: how should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources?’.

In his address, Peter Haber (University of Basel) gives a brief historiography and definition of ‘data-driven history’. He then offers a case study and concludes by raising more general questions.

In the first panel of the symposium ‘Websites as sources: how should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources?’, Paul Girard (Sciences Po Paris — Medialab) speaks on ‘The Hypertext Corpus Initiative: methods and tools for social sciences to build corpora from the Web’, a contribution that was also prepared by Mathieu Jacomy, Audrey Baneyx and Tommaso Venturini. Christine Blondel (CNRS, CRHST/Centre Alexandre-Koyré) then describes a specific example of archive publication on a website in the form of a corpus. To close, Thomas Nygren (Umeå University), in an address co-authored by Lotta Vikström (Umeå University), sets out the advantages and limitations of teaching history by using digital databases.

In the second panel of the symposium ‘Websites as sources: how should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources?’, chaired by Sean Takats (CHNM — George Mason University), Thomas Lebarbé (Stendhal–Grenoble 3 University) looks at the contribution made by digital humanities to the study of manuscripts by French writer Stendhal. In a presentation co-authored with Christian Augustin and Thomas Riechert (Leipzig University), Christian Rau (Leipzig University) then describes the research project conducted to mark the 600th anniversary of Leipzig University that involved collecting information about more than 1 300 professors and lecturers. Thomas Riechert (Leipzig University) outlines the technical aspects associated with this project. Finally, Alain Michel (University of Evry-Val d’Essonne) concludes the panel by presenting the ‘Usines 3D’ research programme and describing how 3D models can be used as tools for historical interpretation.

In the third panel of the symposium ‘Websites as sources: how should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources?’, chaired by René Leboutte (University of Luxembourg), Valérie Aubourg (Cergy-Pontoise University) focuses on the use of websites as sources on European political debate. François Allard-Huver (CELSA — Paris-Sorbonne University) raises the question of the transparency of the European Commission’s digital archives and websites.

In the fourth panel of the symposium ‘Websites as sources: how should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources?', chaired by Stefan Gradmann (Humboldt University of Berlin), Niels Brügger (Centre for Internet Research, Aarhus University) gives an address on the Web as a source in itself and as a subject of study. Jonathan Peter (University of Kassel) offers an explorative analysis of how the memory of historical events is dealt with on the Web. Finally, Clément Oury (National Library of France) describes how the National Library of France practises Web archiving and outlines the issues surrounding this question.

In the fifth panel of the symposium ‘Websites as sources: how should humanities and social sciences approach, use and diffuse publicly available online sources?’, chaired by Serge Noiret (European University Institute, Florence), Enrica Salvatori (University of Pisa) presents a critical analysis of the Val di Vara public history project that looks at the ideas of recovering history and building memories. Thomas Cauvin (European University Institute, Florence) gives a presentation on the relationship between the Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland as seen through websites. Finally, Éva Deák (Institute of Ethnology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) describes the various aspects of the ETNOfolk project.

In his keynote address ‘Curating a city’, Mark Tebeau (Cleveland State University) uses his projects on urban social history in Cleveland to illustrate the importance of the notion of ‘curation’ for the digital humanities community and its practices. Taking this topic as a basis, he discusses the main trends associated with digital humanities — the importance of communicating more effectively with the public through new relationships between historians, archivists, librarians and museums, the semantic Web and especially the emergence of connected mobile terminals — and analyses their consequences for the practices of digital humanities researchers.

In his conclusion, Frédéric Clavert (CVCE) draws the main lessons from the symposium.