Methodological Approaches to the Digital Analysis of Educational Media: Exploring Concepts of Europe and the Nation

Abstract

Modern educational media, such as textbooks, construct meaning through language in a multi-modal learning environment. An analysis of the construction of the concepts of Europe and the nation in educational media presents a challenge, in that the number of relevant text passages may be considerable, even if the material does not meet the size criteria for larger-scale statistical processes, as required in corpus analysis. To meet this challenge, the chapter presents and discusses methodological approaches to digital analysis, focusing on medium-sized text but also including big data examples. First, we present methodological approaches that may contribute insights into the characteristics of the data. Then, we demonstrate how to explore the constructions of concepts of Europe and the nation by focusing on search terms, pattern identification and the use of grammatical information. We use this as a basis for describing some possibilities for identifying concepts on which identity constructions may draw. We conclude by discussing the potential and the limits of our approach, and identify its functions. Among the methods that we discuss are the analysis of word frequencies, keyword analysis, n-grams, analysis of concordances, collocation analysis and network analysis. We focus on Danish- and German-language data, and provide examples from both seventeenth- to early twentieth-century and current history textbooks, and Wikipedia and social media.