WorldViews. The World in Textbooks
The WorldViews project team was creating a prototypical research infrastructure that enables material from history, geography and social studies textbooks in different languages to be collected as a model in a standardised workflow, according to relevant standards in history research and information science, and to prepare that material for analysis using digital tools that reflect information science requirements. The textbook extracts entered into WorldViews come from a range of countries and demonstrate how each country positions itself in the world and how it portrays other countries and their histories.
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Aims
The extracts provide examples of the fluidity of regional and spatial attributions and illustrate how corpuses of knowledge and meaning diverge globally and change over time. The collection reflects not only the social production, organisation and circulation of knowledge but also its transregional translatability, interconnectedness and mediality within historical processes.
As the extracts are taken from very different countries from all over the world and from many different periods they are therefore especially suited to examinations of multiperspectivity: in textbooks and teaching, for example.
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Methodology
The original transcribed texts and their German and English translations are formatted using TEI, in order to make the content compatible for processing with digital humanities tools. Context is added to the selected textbook extracts in the form of information regarding the textbook, authors and publisher, as well as scholarly annotations and education histories. Essays provide additional information on overarching issues of interdisciplinary and transnationally oriented (educational media) research.
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Results
