In Practice

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Centre for Digital Research in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Educational Science (CEDIFOR)

As a contact point for eHumanities, CEDIFOR aims to support research in the humanities and social sciences with qualitative orientation. In this context, DIPF specifically addresses transdisciplinary and national educational research.

The Centre for Digital Research in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Educational Science aims to provide methodological expertise for initiating and supporting research in the humanities and social sciences with qualitative orientation in the Rhine-Main area, including a transdisciplinary educational scientific perspective. The sustainable storage of research data is intended. Pilot projects from eHumanities will be supervised in their conceptualisation and preparation of relevant research tasks, necessary technological support will be assured, and CEDIFOR will also provide an infrastructure and thus store project data and research findings.

We intend CEDIFOR to become a widely acknowledged address for eHumanities. Based on profound competencies and a comprehensive toolkit, customised solutions will be compiled for research questions in the humanities. CEDIFOR will also support research practice implementations.

During the project funding phase, the CEDIFOR innovation strategy will be immediately demonstrated at DIPF regarding support for three educational research projects. As a key provider of research and information infrastructures in education, DIPF pursues a transdisciplinary and also national support for educational research within the joint eHumanities project.

Supported Research Projects are:


A Virtual Research Environment for the History of Education based on a Semantic Wiki Technology (Semantic MediaWiki for Collaborative Corpora Analysis: Semantic CorA)

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)" targeted the development of a virtual research environment (VRE) based on Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) for the collaborative analysis of comprehensive digitised data corpora and an exemplary sustained nesting in the professional community of the history of education. Moreover, the project provided a sharing of the researchers' enrichments and analysis and in the long term, an infrastructural distribution of Semantic CorA to other disciplines. It was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from Januar 2011 until October 2014.

Owing to its concrete need for collaborative means of analysing pedagogical reference books, the domain of history of education offered a good starting point for exemplarily realizing a virtual research environment. Well-established co-operations existed in the community of researchers, librarians and technicians. Such collaborations have, for instance, led to several digitization projects and an amount of research data for this domain. Semantic CorA permitted an integration of digitised documents along with their bibliographic metadata, collaborative analysis in a quantitative and qualitative sense, and connection of linked data with practical research in the digital humanities. Libraries were enabled to integrate the products from their digitization projects (primary data) into professional discourse and generate added scientific value by semantically linking digitized ressources with analytic results – as well as enabling integrated archiving.

Semantic CorA links up to concrete research projects in the history of education, aimed at discourse and field analyses of pedagogical reference works. Dictionaries from Scripta Paedagogica Online (SPO) (1774-1942), hosted by the Library of the History for Education at the German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), are integrated. SPO indexes references to relevant pedagogical works at the level of articles, rendering them accessible online as image files. The corpus started with 25 lexica and a total amount of nearly 22,000 articles. The researchers extended the corpus to more than 80.

A participative design of the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) was conducted by consulting the researchers and empowering them to take an active part in development. Thereby, the development was adjusted to the research process and an agile computing, a step-by-step open-source publishing, was realized.

This project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) entitled: "Entwicklung einer Virtuellen Forschungsumgebung für die Historische Bildungsforschung mit Semantischer Wiki-Technologie - Semantic MediaWiki for Collaborative Corpora Analysis (INST 367/5-1, INST 5580/1-1 and RI 803/10-2, STU 170/21-2, HO 2134/7-2)" in the domain of Scientific Library Services and Information Systems (LIS). It is realized in a cooperation of the German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Research Library for the History of Education (BBF), and the Georg-August-University Göttingen.

Descriptions of the technical and the educational research perspective:


Virtual Research Environment for Student Journals (VFU-PAUSE)

Recently, the DFG-project West German Student Journals From the 1950s and 1960s (PAUSE) decided to use a Semantic CorA pilot to test the VRE for their purposes. The project analyzes student journals dating from 1949 to 1968, which are part of the comprehensive collection of student journals of West-German secondary schools at the Research Library for the History of Education (BBF). The project analyses the student journals as artefacts of secondary school cultures. In a first step, a quantitative evaluation of the stock is intended. Qualitative case studies will follow to investigate in how far student journals were established and changed between 1949 and 1968.

  • Description of the research project (PAUSE) (EnDe)


Other projects



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