Questioning the ‘transparency’ of European Commission’s digital archives and websites
Résumé
Questioning the "transparency" of European Commission’s digital archives and websites.
In the past decade, digital media emerged both as research topics and as research tools for researchers and actors in the public sphere, especially here the European public sphere. They forecasted and accompanied an era of open archives, of easily accessible online data and of digitalized documents. But the role of researchers in the humanities, in social sciences and in digital humanities is also to carefully look and interrogate these changing media environment and its influence on the political life. Does the online accessibility of some documents limit public opinion inquiries – and researchers too – to the easiest accessible sources? What is the epistemological status of digitalized documents? Moreover, what are the characteristics and requirements of public institutions’ websites? Are availability, rapidity and openness deriving from the use of digital archives? Nevertheless, are these archives and websites ensuring the “transparency” of European institutions? Is “digital transparency” a property of the technical apparatus?
The goal of this work is to explore how recent models of public deliberation and decision making processes are intrinsically associated with online archives and websites in the European public space and cyber-space. Websites and archives are considered both as main sources for the researchers but also as object of the research; this study will therefore propose a techno-semiotic methodology for analyzing digital media.
First, this project will examine the properties and problems of digital media through the idea of ”digital transparency” and will fully articulate it with previous findings on the role of mass media in the European construction and integration process.
Second, a techno-semiotic method for exploring digital archives and European institutional websites will be used. This method starts from the medium, examines documents and their formats, appreciates how texts are conserved and ends with the evaluation of the discourses carried by the archives themselves. This method will be applied to the case study of a European public deliberation process: the European Commission’s Thematic strategy on the sustainable use of pesticides. This study follows different stakeholders, describes their discursive strategies and the discursive formations they constructed online, through the dedicated European Commission website. In addition, it conducts a qualitative discourse analysis of more than 150 stakeholders’ contributions to the debate conserved in the online archives.
Third, as most of the researchers use digital archives and websites for their studies this project can be seen as an opportunity to think about the practice of research itself. This paper will discuss the ideological beliefs and myths mostly associated with digital media in order to recognize their added value and to reintegrate them in the history of intellectual technologies and research tools for humanities and social sciences.
In conclusion, focusing on European Commission’s digital media uses and political implications allows to “re-contextualize” sociological and historical investigations on the European integration process within the changing media environment.