Virtual Research Environment for Research in the History of Education

Project description

The project “A Virtual Research Environment for the History of Education based on a Semantic Wiki Technology (Semantic MediaWiki for Collaborative Corpora Analysis: Semantic CorA)” targets the development of a virtual research environment (VRE) based on Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) for a collaborative analysis of comprehensive digitised text corpora and an exemplary sustained nesting into the professional community of researchers in the history of education. Moreover, the project aims to provide for a possible further use of the enrichment and analysis works of the researchers and in the long term, an infrastructural distribution of the VRE (Semantic CorA) to other disciplines with community building.

Owing to its concrete need for collaborative instruments for analysing pedagogical reference books, the domain of history of education offers a good starting point for exemplarily realising a virtual research environment. Furthermore, sound co-operations are well established in the respective community among researchers, librarians and technicians, which have for instance resulted in several digitisation projects. The VRE allows for an integration of digitised documents along with their bibliographic metadata, collaboratively analysing them in a quantitative and qualitative sense, and thus connecting the idea of Linked Data with practical research in the humanities. This eHumanities project will enable libraries to integrate results from their digitisation projects into professional discourse in terms of primary data and generate added scientific value in the chain of creating research values, by a direct semantic connection between digitised records and analytic results – as well as enabling integrated archiving.

The exemplary realisation of the VRE links up to a concrete research project in the history of education, aimed at discourse and field analyses of pedagogical reference works dating from 1774 to 1942. The project will focus on three levels of analysis (dictionaries, lemmata, texts), investigating their content, scope of discourse and argument. The VRE will hence integrate the dictionaries from Scripta Paedagogica Online (SPO), hosted by the Library for the History of Education at the DIPF, which already indexes references to relevant pedagogical reference works at the level of articles, rendering them accessible online as image files. The corpus contains a total amount of nearly 22,000 articles.

An iterative development of the VRE is envisaged, adjusted to the research process with agile computing, step-by-step open-source publishing, participative design by consulting the participants and empowering them to take an active part in designing the VRE, as well as requirement and demand analyses.

The project receives funding from the German Research Foundation, in the domain of “Scientific Library Services and Information Systems“ (LIS).

Management of the entire project (DIPF): Marc Rittberger
Project co-ordination (DIPF): Christoph Schindler
Project partner at the AIFB: Rudi Studer, Basil Ell, (Denny Vrandečić, Cornelia Veja)
Project partner at the IfE: Klaus-Peter Horn, Anne Hild, Anna Stisser

Website

Co-operations

• Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Economics and Business Engineering (AIFB), Karlsruhe Institute for Technoloy (KIT)
• Research Library for the History of Education (BBF), DIPF
• Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Institute of Education (IfE)
• Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI)

Publications

DIPF-Publications

Project Team

Project Details