In its 30th year, the European Association of Educational Research (EERA) unites more than 40 national associations and encompasses around 30 various networks that cluster focal themes. The annual European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) draws the participation of more than 2,000 researchers, facilitating international exchange and academic socialization. This event plays a pivotal role in advancing the concept of a "European Educational Research Space" emphasizing the culturally specific intellectual and social practices of research (Lawn, 2002; Lawn & Keiner, 2006), while acknowledging the diversity arising from national frameworks, distinct disciplinary perspectives, and a wide array of theoretical and methodological approaches (Keiner, 2006; Knaupp et al., 2014). The rich diversity of ECER submissions is fundamental to the analysis of developments and various topics within educational research.

On the occasion of EERA’s 30th anniversary, we aim to put the ECER submissions at the centre of the research workshop, delving into the potentials and limitations of this corpus and presenting insights into the evolution of ECER based on these submissions. The corpus is based on a data dump provided by the EERA office and consists of more than 35,000 submissions in various presentation formats delivered to the ECER from 1998 to 2024. While this corpus offers intriguing insights into geographical, topical, network-related and temporal aspects, continued enrichment and cleansing are imperative.

Five short papers deal with the ECER submission corpus from different perspectives:

The first paper describes in detail the ECER submission corpus, outlining necessary cleansing and enrichment, and presenting basic data, including networks and geographical aspects. Further, it discusses the feasibility of establishing an open and continuously updated corpus. The second presentation explores the potentials of natural language processing methods such as topic modelling (Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004) to identify underlying themes and the topical structure of large and heterogeneous corpora. By addressing the lack of content indexing of the submissions, it focuses these questions: Which key topics can be identified from the contributions to the ECER conferences in terms of (a) their subject of research, and (b) their applied methods? How are these topics distributed across (a) the ECER networks, (b) the affiliation countries of the first author and (c) time? The third presentation adopts a detailed network perspective to the corpus. Network 10, teacher education research, analyses submissions in the long term based on bibliographic data and the generated topics, theories and methods used of the network. Since teacher education is embedded in inherently regionally anchored forms of institutionalisation, it is interesting to examine how submissions create a European communication space and how it can be characterised. The fourth paper takes a critically-engaged perspective by discussing translations and national framings of main terms of European Educational Research. The fifth contribution invites to discuss the potentials and limits of the data sources regarding knowledge production at the ECER to analyse new practices, partnerships of research, cross-national work and new subjects.

These five papers, each presenting a unique perspective, serve as the starting point for a lively discussion of the benefits of the corpus and potential outcomes.

The construction and analysis of the ECER submission corpus involves a multi-faceted approach. The first two papers focus on the collection and empirical work. The following three papers accompany and reflect these first works. The first paper is a comprehensive overview of the research corpus construction, utilizing a data dump from EERA that incorporates abstracts and bibliographic metadata, similar to the online programme search (https://eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/). The data set is limited by a high inconsistency of names and affiliations. The latter are addressed by a semi-automated approach to assign an explicit country to the affiliations of the researchers via Wikidata. In the second paper, the contributions were initially subjected to a pre-processing and cleaning process. Subsequently, after analysing the bibliographic parameters of all contributions (including affiliation countries, network, first author etc.), key topics regarding the subject of research and methods of all contributions were identified. For this purpose, one of the most widely used natural language processing methods was applied, i.e. topic modelling. Topic modelling enables the identification of underlying topics in large text corpora by simultaneously (a) determining clusters of words and word combinations – so called topics – frequently occurring together and (b) clustering documents of a corpus according to their similarity to these topics (Blei et al., 2003). The results of the text mining approach were then analysed cross-sectionally as well as longitudinally to determine focal points, desiderata and trends of research from 1998 to 2023. Differences or similarities in research foci for different ECER networks, years and affiliations were also determined by differentially analysing and visualizing the distributions of the topics across the aforementioned parameters.

The occasion of the 30th anniversary of the EERA presents a significant opportunity to engage in an in-depth discussion and exploration of an open corpus derived from ECER submissions. While the ECER contributes to a "European Educational Research Space”, its corpus of submissions creates a basis for critical engagement. The research workshop explores the potentials and limits of this ECER corpus of submissions and discusses ways of continuous maintenance and open access. The findings from the five papers constitute a solid foundation in this regard. The first paper elucidates the schema of the basic data available from the ECER conference and provides a feasibility estimation for sustaining an open and updated corpus. The outcomes of the second paper inform the audience and EERA network members about trends, desiderata and focal points of interest over the last 25 years. The results will be openly made available as an interactive tool, allowing interested parties to explore the processed corpus subject to their individual interests. The outcome of the third paper is the network perspective on the analytical potentials of the corpus. A question for the discussion is, if the outcomes of the topic modelling enable to identify distinguished specific values on which teacher education in Europe (and beyond) is based? The fourth and fifth paper provide further context about the ECER, reflect the corpus and its analytical boundaries. We welcome researchers from different networks and fields to participate and reveal some of the processes needed to carry on a critical engagement with the ECER through its submissions.

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