Digital Atlas of European Historiography since 1800 provides a free access, web-based historical-geographic information system on the European history of Historiography. For that purpose, the institutional framework conditions for the professionalization and institutionalization of Historiography throughout the 19th and 20th centuries are being documented for all European countries. The project is under the direction of Professor Dr. Lutz Raphael. It is being conducted as a Leibniz research alliance project in cooperation with the service center eSciences at Trier University. It is based on data collected and analyzed, and on historical cartographic material generated in a DFG-funded project as a part of the European research program Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe (NHIST), which produced a printed atlas on the European history of Historiography (Atlas of European Historiography. The Making of a Profession 1800–2005, edited by Ilaria Porciani and Lutz Raphael, Basingstoke 2010 (Writing the Nation, Vol. 1)).
The digital project goes beyond the possibilities of the printed work and is intended to offer a new, extended access to the collected data on historical chairs and professorships, academies and research institutions, museums, archives, historical associations, and journals. Moreover, it aims to enable a comparative and systematic processing and cartographic representation of the different chronologies and institutions of the Historical sciences in all European countries. For that purpose, the data are fed into the virtual research environment FuD and are transferred via a GeoJSON interface to the geographic information system based on OpenLayers (v5) to enable cartographic processing. The user of the digital information system will be able to compile, view, and analyze the data of the European maps from the project for the years 1830, 1850, 1878, 1900, 1928, 1955, 1980, and 2005. There are possibilities for data export and statistical evaluation that enable further visualization of the material. Moreover, the system composed of the virtual research environment FuD and the geographic information system is created in a way that enables a collaborative expansion regarding both data collection and cartographic implementation, in order to allow for adding new data as well as new cartographic material to the system.
