At the Intersection of Scientific Cultures: Historical Educational Research and Digital Humanities Explore Educational Discourses
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Profile
- Project leadership
- Andreas Hoffmann-Ocon (PHZH), Anne Bosche, Philipp Dreesen (ZHAW), Peter C. Pohl (University of Innsbruck)
- Project team
- Norbert Grube (PHZH), Tomas Bascio (PHZH)
- Organisational unit
- F-BW-ZSG (Schulgeschichte)
- Project phase
- Completed (1.10.2023 – 30.6.2025)
- Project type
- Research & development project
- Funding
- Canton of Zurich Charitable Fund for Education
- Participating institutions
- Stiftung Pestalozzianum; Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW; University of Innsbruck
Description
The digital availability of much of the Pestalozzianum collection – such as teaching materials from Zurich elementary schools, archival estates of seminar directors and pedagogical journals – enables explorations of how different academic cultures can be productively brought into contact. The interweaving of a historical-critical contextualising source analysis (close reading) with the digital examination of large text corpora oriented towards pattern recognition (distant reading) is intended to strengthen the understanding of the stability and transformation of discourse in the history of education. This approach questions established research routines in the historical field of education and upbringing. The investigative focus is primarily directed at the collections from the 19th century.
Combining different scientific practices – substantiating educational history content
The project combines previous interdisciplinary interpretative textual approaches of historical educational research with approaches of the digital humanities. The aim is to gain a sound understanding of the important position and diversity of the Zurich location in the history of education. Methodological follow-up questions arising from the setting, such as the peculiarities of digital humanities and cultural studies practices, will be carefully reflected upon. Therefore, the instrumental character of categories in historical contexts will be discussed in detail. In this way, within an interdisciplinary research process, increases in knowledge incurred through the use of distinct categories will be discussed in relation to possible increases of knowledge gained through greater categorical indeterminacy with respect to promising historical sources.
New perspectives on seemingly familiar narratives
The interdisciplinary historical view of educational discourses sensitises us to the constructed nature of communication in the broad field of upbringing and education. For example, statistically conspicuous topics and frequently mentioned actors and actor constellations will be traced in an interpretative and contextualising way. What form of critique of canonised knowledge arises when distant reading is understood as an attempt to gain a new perspective on seemingly already known educational-historical narratives with corpus- and not work-based text collections? Finally, from these perspectives, the implicit theoretical assumptions underlying approaches to digital humanities and distant reading can also be grasped.
Project outcomes
The project has essentially examined continuity and change in social discourses on education and upbringing in the Canton of Zurich. The purpose of analysing historical documents was to answer the question of what perspectives on educational history narratives emerge when corpus-based rather than work-based text collections are used as source materials.
Project progress
One sub-project (Zurich University of Teacher Education PHZH and Pestalozzianum Foundation along with Schaffhausen University of Teacher Education PHSH) drew on current discussions on the research and methodology related to techniques of distant reading of large amounts of text, partly in combination with the established close reading. The example of discourses on the broad field of the “work school” for a period from the late 19th to the 20th century served in particular to explore the frequencies and contexts of use of certain terms and thus the potential of the distant reading method. A Corpus Workbench from the Swiss-AL corpus family for discourse analysis created by the research partner team at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZAHW/Applied Linguistics was used for this purpose. The text corpus, which was used primarily for term queries in the project, comprised the Official School Gazette of the Canton of Zurich (1886–1968), the Communications of the Pestalozzianum (an “institute for the promotion of schooling and education and research on Pestalozzi”, 1899–1987) and the reports on the proceedings of the Zurich School Synod (1834–1992) – all of which being journals in the broad sense of education policy.
Results
The experience gained in using the Workbench, which touched on theoretical, methodological and methodical aspects, confirms that frequency indicators obtained through database queries provide an orientation of trends in word usage. This provides clues to discourse dominance and patterns. In order to obtain insights into parallel semantic connotations for further interpretations, the function of the word environment had to be considered. Work on the example of the term “Arbeitsschule” (work school) made it clear that the use of the term was not subject to radical breaks, for example along the lines of events, but rather that semantic shifts took place gradually and in various contexts of word usage, including time-bound ones. These findings point to methodological follow-up questions about the tool-like nature of conceptual categories in historical contexts. These initial findings suggest that the use of distant reading by “digital lay people” in the field of educational history promotes the identification of certain patterns of term usage that historians with close-reading routines are more likely to miss. At the same time, it is clear that the results of Workbench queries are not self-interpreting, but require digital hermeneutic knowledge of the filtering logic of corpus query tools for comprehensive analysis and interpretation.
Research presentations
In 2023, the sub-project participants from PHZH (Tomas Bascio, Norbert Grube and Andreas Hoffmann-Ocon) and the Pestalozzianum Foundation as well as from PHSH (Anne Bosche) held several joint research meetings, discussing initial findings of the project and methodological and theoretical research literature. An online workshop on 22 May 2024 with the overall project partner Philipp Dreesen (ZHAW) and further exchange of interim research findings with the overall project partners Peter Pohl and Sophie Modert (Department of Modern German Literature at the Institute of German Studies at the Leopold Franzens University of Innsbruck) led to a readjustment of the text corpora in 2024. On 19 May 2025, the final findings of the sub-project of the PHZH (Tomas Bascio, Norbert Grube and Andreas Hoffmann-Ocon) and the Pestalozzianum Foundation along with PHSH (Anne Bosche) were presented and discussed in a workshop held at the Research Library for the History of Education at DIPF (Berlin) named “Text mining in educational science – between criticism and euphoria”. The title of the presentation was “Doing distant reading? Analysis of educational discourses in the Canton of Zurich based on Swiss German journals (19th and 20th centuries)”.
Benefits of methodological reflection and research findings for education
Given the widespread digitisation of historical sources, especially serial ones, critical-reflective examination of methods of distant and blended reading in the context of digital humanities is also beneficial for working with students. Students often use digitised sources for seminars and papers and can now use the findings of the sub-project and test these complementary methods and the perspectives gained from them. The project findings are also of interest to the methodology school at the PHZH, in which the Centre for School History has been involved for many years, and can constructively enrich the discussion of methods with internal and external researchers and PhD students.