With economic growth still slow in some parts of Europe, the key societal challenges facing the European Union are investment, growth, and job creation. Unstable capital markets had undermined corporate investments and led to unemployment and social inequality.
To meet these challenges, the European Union needs sound scientific evidence. Big data are promising tools in science, but they lack the depth that historical data (usually paper-based and not yet existing in digital form) can provide to understand the dynamics of the past, the present and the future. Indeed, the current lack of high quality long-term empirical European data prevents the usage and testing of models for analysing structural and cyclical changes. For example, the 2008 Financial Crisis began in the mortgage-backed security (MBS) sector, where risk models went astray because they were calibrated on only five to ten years of historical data taken from a benign period. If longer-term historical data had been available to build empirical models based on larger timespans, a more robust understanding of the underlying currents and risks could have been possible, which could have potentially led to better preparation or forewarning on the crisis.
The heterogeneity of historical business rules and practises of different national and regional variations call for an ad hoc Research Infrastructure (RI) that can connect to other existing systems. IT research must develop innovative technologies that push forward the technological frontier in the historical social sciences: the scaling up of the variety, quantity, and quality of long-term data. Digitalized historical sources as part of the European cultural heritage represent a shared wealth in citizenship, cultural growth, and economic potential. EURHISFIRM meets the need for establishing state-of-the-art benchmark RIs in Europe in the social sciences and humanities, in which both big and historical data have yet to be fully exploited.
EURHISFIRM therefore designs a world-class RI to connect, collect, collate, align, and share detailed, reliable, and standardized long-term company-level data for Europe to enable researchers, policymakers, scholars, and private companies to analyse, develop, and evaluate effective strategies to promote investment and economic growth. The creation of a vibrant European community will support the project’s development based on innovative technologies to spark a “big data revolution” in the historical social sciences within the open science landscape and to open access to cultural heritage in cooperation with existing RIs. This design will enable ESFRI, member states and other funding bodies to decide on the further preparation and implementation of the RI.
