This document is written to give some shape to what might be the next phase of my project. Some activities I would like to engage in for that project include:
- giving talks on automated text analysis with a focus on school textbooks
- recording school stories surrounding books
- providing a variety of platforms for textbook researchers and others to share their work
- conferences
- books of collected essays
- film and video discussions of textbooks
- collaborating with other researchers on larger projects
- creating collector and reading groups
- creating community research collectives
The current project, which is to do a textual and social analysis of the revision of text material in a high-school writing contest held in Texas, is intended to be a prototype or exemplar of the kinds of analysis that can be done on textbook archives.
The larger project is exciting because, while so much is being done in the study of digitally archived materials, the study of textbooks offers ways to connect individual school experience with collective educational and democratic projects. It provides a democratic focus to research that can foster research skills and capacity in everyday people. Almost everyone had some school or learning experience that may connect with books and text, or we have learned from reading.
A number of digital textbook archives exist Internet Archive
- available to the public as well as to scholars
- Internet Archive lists 92 collections of textbooks, comprising 34,518 texts
- digital archives are often searchable, and can be converted into analytic corpuses
- archives are readily accessible to the visually and hearing impaired
Textbooks are keys to understanding many things
history, culture, technology, pedagogy, specific disciplines, oppression, ideologies, social attitudes
A tradition of textbook research exists
Anyon, Jean. 1979. “Ideology and United States History Textbooks.” Harvard Educational Review 49 (3): 361–86.
Issitt, John. 2004. “Reflections on the Study of Textbooks.” History of Education 33 (6): 683–96.
Paxton, Richard J. 1999. “A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read Them.” Review of Educational Research 69 (3): 315–39.
Nietz, John Alfred. The evolution of American secondary school textbooks. CE Tuttle Company, 1966.
Pierce, Bessie Louise. Civic attitudes in American school textbooks. Vol. 9. University of Chicago Press, 1930.
This study of civic education is one of a series of similar analyses in a variety of states. Broadly speaking, the common purpose of these inquiries has been that of examining objectively the systems of civic cohesion in a group of states, of determining the broad trends of civic training in these modem nations, and of indicating possibilities in the further development and control of civic education. vii
The study of textbooks lends itself to storytelling, community building, and social justice
- Groups can be formed to share research stories, school histories and stories, new resources, research methods
The study of textbooks lends itself to digital and automated processing of texts
- Programs like Voyant.org Tools and other automated analysis platforms
- Loon, Austin van. 2022. “Three Families of Automated Text Analysis.” Social Science Research 108 (November): 102798.
- It is both public and academic, so many people can get involved in a variety of ways
- It calls on shared experiences that are interesting to remember and make for good stories
- It uses written and oral (story) discourse in productive ways
- There are many archives that can be explored and they are all available to the public
- It makes for interesting, intersectional and cross-disciplinary work
- It uses easy to use and free technology for making meaning from text materials
- It lends itself to scholarship because of the theoretical and technical basis of the work