Applications
GLOTREC|Cat
The GLOTREC|Cat brings together the GEI inventory with other educational media collections from around the world and enables new and intuitive search possibilities. Users can browse the collection or filter their searches according to typical textbook characteristics such as subject, school type or school level. The bibliographic data held on the digitised textbooks in GEI-Digital is shown as a separate part of the inventory in the GLOTREC|Cat. The GLOTREC|Cat provides a range of possibilities for bibliographic data to be reproduced in various formats.
DiaCollo for GEI-Digital
The ‘DiaCollo for GEI-Digital’ project enabled the volumes available as full-texts in GEI-Digital at the end of 2020 to be formatted as the ‘GEI-Digital 2020’ corpora, which was then indexed for use in the corpus management system D* (Dstar) created by the Research Centre Language at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW). The project website provides access to the corpus and tools available in D*, including frequency analysis, simple and complex searches, and diachronic collocation analysis using the ‘DiaCollo’ tool:
GEI-Digital visualized
GEI-Digital visualized offers interactive access to the virtual GEI-Digital textbook library. The collections included in GEI-Digital are catalogued according to the specific requirements of textbook research. This means that in addition to the publisher and year of publication, the meta data also includes information on the school subject and school level. Based on this differentiated cataloguing, the GEI has developed the interactive tool GEI-Digital visualized, in collaboration with the FH Potsdam. By allowing metadata and different interactive combinations, it is possible to illustrate historical developments within the textbook market as well as changes in products, production and participants.
Children and Their World - Explorer
In order to develop new approaches and to test and improve existing tools from the digital humanities and computer linguistics, a cooperative research group was formed comprising staff from the Georg Eckert Institute (history studies), the University of Hildesheim (computer sciences) and the German Institute for International Education Research (DIPF)/ TU Darmstadt (computer linguistics, software engineering). The group was complemented by partnerships with the university library at the TU Braunschweig, the University of Zurich, the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities and the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (BSB).
The project, which was funded by the Leibniz Association’s Leibniz Competition, aimed to
to adapt tools that had been successfully applied in other areas of the Digital Humanities (such as topic detection and opinion mining) so that they could be used by historians studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This opened new access to ‘mass’ sources, which present contemporary paradigms of elements of cultural memory and interpretations of the world, whilst equally mirroring and shaping them.
Specifically, word frequency, grammatical forms, semantic fields and the positioning of themes and stakeholders were analysed. In order to ensure the long-term usability of findings from the project, the approaches developed were not only refined and made available to researchers, they were also turned into digital assets through the ‘Children and their world explorer’ developed during the project.
The tools designed to analyse the ‘GEI-Digital’ corpus [from 2017] are also available for the visualisation of metadata.
OCR4all
Coming Soon
OCR4all combines several open-source solutions in order to provide a fully automated workflow for automatic text recognition of historic printed (OCR) and handwritten (HTR) material. At almost every stage of the workflow users can interact with the results in order to minimise inherited errors and to optimise the final results.
With its understandable and intuitive operation, OCR4all explicitly addresses the needs of technically inexperienced users.
The software is being further developed at the centre for philology and digitality (ZPD) at the University of Würzburg (JMU) and is open to as large a user group as possible. If installed as a docker application OCR4all enables users to independently carry out a large proportion of the OCR process in order to create high quality texts.
