This research workshop tries to give possible answers to the following questions, by cooperating scholars from different fields of knowledge:
1. What is the impact of the ideas of Digital Era and Big Data on research questions in educational research, from a historical perspective?
2. What competencies do educational researchers need in the digital era?
3. What tasks and requirements does educational research assign to infrastructures?
Archivists, librarians and historians together, a joint session from members of Network 12 and 17 introduce their research to highlight the emerging importance of digitised sources and methods, which affect both viewpoints and practice of scholarly works. One of our main scopes is to connect theory and methodology, showing both possibilities and challenges, in four proposals.
The first presentation deals with problems and solutions in the case of a historical study of the creation of a new educational ideology (the New Math reform) in the United States and its travel to Europe with a focus on Luxembourg. The project had a massive amount of records from several countries and in different formats such as already digitised documents, categorised analogue materials and uncategorised documents found in abandoned archives. As the goal was to give a sense of the creation and the reformation of the idea, it was necessary to historicise and contextualise the data, which means to consider where, when and for what purposes each document was produced, how and where it was stored. Thus, a digitisation process was chosen to bring all data into a single platform to facilitate the process of analysing and the understanding of the whole.
Two case studies follow, demonstrate the working and functions of different datasets, in historical time. One is the “Bilderbuch für Kinder”: In 1790 the publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch announced a very ambitious project: a picture book describing the world in high-quality prints, specially made for - and intended to be directly handled by – children. This publication was a success for Bertuch’s publishing house: issued in small instalments of five plates each the “Bilderbuch für Kinder” lasted for 40 years, building up to an edition of almost 1200 plates. The homepage, Interlinking Pictura presents these images in the context of their origins and in connection with other digital sources on an open working platform, a new approach in making images accessible.
The second one is a prototype of a data exploration tool, which makes the networks in higher education in Prussia searchable. In Prussia, every school was bound to publish annual school reports. They contain information about the curricula, teachers and pupils. In combination with school teachers’ personal records from Prussian administration, these are outstanding serial and statistical sources for the history of education. Despite digitisation efforts, the sources so far could only be accessed by close reading. The Research Library for the History of Education at DIPF (BBF) now aims to make these data in higher granularity accessible for machine reading approaches.
Closing the research workshop, the political dimension comes to the foreground: with close reading of a CIA report, we can learn a lot from the legal and technological aspects of the online access, outside characteristics of a file and the possible meanings of a text, a brief methodology to begin the research with the archives. The case of intelligence and state security documents warns us the intentionality of the sources: these reports create a unique viewpoint, in the context of the Cold War. In a broader framework, the political, ethical questions arise: Who made these files? How this information was used in the decision-making? How can we make them accessible online?
