Children and their World
There are few periods in history that were so profoundly marked by changes in the bodies of knowledge passed down to successive generations than the second half of the nineteenth century.
The first steps towards globalisation permanently changed people’s view of the world, not only that of adults, but also of children and young people; rapid globalisation processes directly coincided with growing nationalism, faith in progress and anxiety about crisis. Industrialisation and the destruction of traditional ways of life, growing poverty and gentrification all equally shaped everyday life and were closely intertwined as elements of the dissolution of boundaries and the limitation of world views. The expanding market for books responded in diverse ways to people’s changing reading behaviour and the demand for new types of literature this engendered. While some studies on individual aspects of these developments exist, we know little about the overall impressions which young people of the period had of ‘their’ world in an age where the pace of life was rapidly increasing, as was the rate of progress, while erstwhile traditions were successively declining and disappearing. Textbooks and books for children and young people therefore represent a particularly rich corpus of sources whose exploration allows us to retrace and uncover both what we might view as quasi-official interpretations of the transformations the world was undergoing at this time and the ways in which people at large responded to these changes. There are few other sources which enable us to access a similarly clear picture of what was considered to be relevant both in the building of nation states and in the changing canon of knowledge about the world
However, the sheer number of textbooks, children’s books and books for young people presents a significant challenge to traditional history research methodologies; our project alone is investigating a corpus of approximately 3,800 digitised works.
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Aims
In order to develop new research approaches and to test and improve existing tools used in computational linguistics and the digital humanities, a group of researchers from the Georg Eckert Institute (history), the University of Hildesheim Foundation (information sciences), and the German Institute for International Educational Research in cooperation with the TU Darmstadt (computational linguistics, software development), formed a collaborative research group in May 2014. The researchers were joined by project partners from the library of the University of Braunschweig, the University of Zürich, the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities and the Bavarian State Library. The project opened up new, transdisciplinary, ways of gaining knowledge and insight, reflected on their reach in terms of established qualitative methods, and contributed to a potential shift in the boundaries of historical research in this area.
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Methodology
Funded through the Leibniz Competition, the project aimed to harness the tools previously employed successfully in other areas of the digital humanities, such as topic detection and opinion mining, for the use of historians interested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The group had to reconstruct intertextual connections, identify and highlight thematic clusters, and explore semantic fields, in order to generate quantitative findings and interpret them in their historical context. This work opened up new access to ‘mass’ sources, which, as representations of typical contemporary patterns for interpreting the world and elements of cultural memory, both reflected and shaped that memory, but were under-reflected in previous research. The project also aimed to generate hypotheses which historians could examine and refine using a hermeneutic exploration of selected works. Specifically, the project analysed the frequencies with which particular words occur, the use of grammatical forms, the appearance of semantic fields and the ways in which historical topics and figures are positioned in the texts. In order to secure the project’s sustainability, the approaches developed were not only made available to the research community, but were also made available in digital form through the ‘Children and their World - Explorer’, developed by the project.
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Results
Publications (selection)
- Lässig, Simone; Weiß, Andreas (eds.): The World of Children: Foreign Cultures in Nineteenth-Century German Education and Entertainment. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019.
- Themenheft World Knowledge and Non-European Space: Nineteenth-Century Geography Textbooks and Children’s Books, JEMMS. Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 10 (2018), 1.
- Weiß, Andreas; Nieländer, Maret: '"Schönere Daten" – Nachnutzung und Aufbereitung für die Verwendung in Digital-Humanities-Projekten', in: Nieländer, Maret; De Luca, Ernesto William (eds.): Digital Humanities in der internationalen Schulbuchforschung (Eckert.Expertise 9). Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2018, 91-116; www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com/themen-entdecken/sozial-rechts-und-wirtschaftswissenschaften/sozialwissenschaft/49223/digital-humanities-in-der-internationalen-schulbuchforschung.
- Weiß, Andreas; Heuwing, Ben: 'Suche und Analyse in großen Textsammlungen: Neue Werkzeuge für die Schulbuchforschung' in: Nieländer, Maret; De Luca, Ernesto William (eds): Digital Humanities in der internationalen Schulbuchforschung (Eckert.Expertise 9). Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2018, 145-169; www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com/themen-entdecken/sozial-rechts-und-wirtschaftswissenschaften/sozialwissenschaft/49223/digital-humanities-in-der-internationalen-schulbuchforschung.
- Weiß, Andreas: 'Introduction: World Knowledge and Non-European Space Nineteenth-Century Geography Textbooks and Children’s Books', in: Weiß, Andreas (ed.): Weltwissen und der außereuropäische Raum: Geographieschulbücher und Kinderbücher des 19. Jahrhunderts im internationalen Vergleich. JEMMS. Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 10 (2018), 1, S. 1-9.
- Weiß, Andreas: Reading East Asia in Schools of the Wilhelmine Empire, in: Weiß, Andreas (ed): 'Weltwissen und der außereuropäische Raum: Geographieschulbücher und Kinderbücher des 19. Jahrhunderts im internationalen Vergleich'. JEMMS. Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 10 (2018), 1, 10-27 (peer reviewed).
- Weiß, Andreas; Fechner, Martin: 'Einsatz von Topic Modeling in den Geschichtswissenschaften: Wissensbestände des 19. Jahrhunderts' in: Zeitschrift für digitale Geschichtswissenschaft (2017); zfdg.de/2017_005 (open reviewed).
- Weiß, Andreas: 'Der Kolonialkrieg im deutschen Schulbuch des Kaiserreiches' in: Portal Militärgeschichte, 21. November 2016; portal-militaergeschichte.de/node/1675.
- Fiedler, Maik: 'Wissensgeschichte aus dem Schulbuch – ‚Mixed Analysis‘ oder Diskurs 2.0?' In: Rath, Imke (et al).: Methoden und Theorien der Bildungsmedien‐ und Bildungsforschung – Ein Werkstattbericht von Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen und ‐wissenschaftlern des Georg‐Eckert‐Instituts, 44-63 - URI: https://repository.gei.de/handle/11428/233
