Digitisation and indexing of historical textbooks on religious education and development of a knowledge base for educational history research

Religious texts and content played a significant role until well into the nineteenth century in all teaching materials for subjects that foster a sense of meaning and identity, which include German, history and geography as well as religious education. Primers were used as first readers and reading books, especially in primary schools, alongside Bibles and compendiums of biblical history, as part of a basic school education focused on religious instruction. Religious education and literacy lessons were therefore closely interrelated, because the teaching of reading skills gave access to religious texts and reading books were explicitly used for religious education.

One of the long-term goals of the Research Library at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) is to make the full-texts of the historical holdings in its unique textbook collection accessible to researchers. This project advances that objective by systematically expanding the Institute’s digital textbook library, GEI-Digital, through the digitisation of German-language religious education textbooks and reading primers dating from the period 1618 to 1870, which will make a valuable contribution to research into the history, origins and impact of religious education. In order to make source material suitable for subsequent use by researchers, the project is working in cooperation with the Zentrum für Digitalität und Philologie (ZPD) at the University of Würzburg and is using new machine learning processes in the field of text recognition. As no directory, in the form of a biobibliography, yet exists of those closely involved with producing textbooks, the project will automatically identify authors, editors and publishers using named entity recognition (NER). By combining named-entity linking with the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) and by adding information from other databases, the project will create a knowledge base to serve as the foundation for a directory of persons involved in educational history research.