EGO|European History Online is a transcultural history of Europe on the Internet published by the Leibniz Institute of European History. The success and the consequential growth of EGO is, however, a challenge for the editorial office. The interlinking of EGO articles with each other and with external resources is an important aspect of EGO's conceptual design, so each new article has to be integrated into the existing link structure. This means not only that the new article has to be linked to relevant existing articles, but the copy editors must also check whether links to the new article need to be added to existing articles.

In cooperation with the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab at TU Darmstadt, the EGOlink project is developing methods for (semi-)automatically linking EGO articles in order to reduce the manual effort for the editorial office and to improve the navigation for readers. In the first step, we analyze and visualize the current link structure statistically to detect problems such as under-linked articles. In the next step, the automatic generation of links is addressed; the two main research questions in this step are (1) the automatic identification and ranking of potential link anchors in EGO articles and (2) the discovery of suitable link targets in other EGO articles or external resources. We will evaluate the success of the project in a user study.

EGOlink is supported as a pilot project by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Social and Educational Sciences (CEDIFOR). CEDIFOR was founded in 2014 by the University of Frankfurt, TU Darmstadt, and the German Institute for International Pedagogical Research (DIPF); it is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The goal of CEDIFOR pilot projects is to demonstrate examplarily the interaction between research questions from the humanities and computer-based methods.

• Project title: Automatic analysis and extension of the internal and external link structure of EGO|European History Online
• Project management: to 2016-12: Michael Piotrowski; 2017: Ines Grund
• Duration: 01.12.2015–30.11.2017
• Funding: CEDIFOR-Pilotprojekt
• In ooperation with: TU Darmstadt