Story: In moving my office in 2022, I found a copy of the Ready Writing Handbook, an instructional text for teachers and contest participants in an extramural program known as the University of Texas, University Interscholastic League. Because the handbook was written during the formative years of the academic discipline of composition studies, and during a time of social and cultural change in North America, it has the potential to reflect in its textual features, how theories, society, and culture were changing. Based on this, I began to wonder to what extent neglected works, found in digital archives, might be sources of fascinating studies into history and culture. This was the beginning of the Schoolbooks project.
Academic: Are you looking for new approaches to historical and textual data for your scholarship? Research in textbooks has kept pace globally with the digitization of information in research archives. Textbook archives (roughly 15 in English as of 2023, more in other languages) provide a wealth of historical and cultural textual data now available for analysis using automated text analysis, AI summary tools, and digital humanities research platforms. This project will help you find, analyze, and produce scholarly knowledge using text archives.
Organizational: Do you want to expand your organizational resources to include historical views of policy and development? The past is not lost and can be retrieved, analyzed, and made operational through the use of automated tools. The Schoolbooks Project shows how organizations are turning to archived texts to harvest practices and policies from archived text materials.
Public: Do you remember schoolbooks or textbooks that helped you when you were learning? These books are not lost to you, and many of them exist in easily readable form in internet archives. This project can help you find, read and analyze, tell stories about your learning and connect with other readers.
An expert panel Report on how Canada's memory institutions (archives, libraries, museums, and galleries) can address the problems of managing Canadian archived cultural content in digital form expressed the solution in this way: "How might memory institutions embrace the opportunities and challenges posed by the changing ways in which Canadians are communicating and working in the digital age?" (Council of Canadian Academies. Expert..., page xii), The report locates the problems in terms of 1) technical issues of management, 2) the sheer volume of information, and 3) "the struggle to remain relevant."
The Schoolbooks Project aims to address two these problems by 1) exploring technical solutions for public and scholarly engagement with digital archives, and 3) helping scholars and the public find academic and personal relevance in digitally archived materials.
My goal is to increase an understanding of digital tools and digitally archived materials and how scholars and the public can interact with these materials to advance interdisciplinary practices in education, digital humanities, and library science toward the goal of responsible academic and civic management of materials pertaining to the heritage of Canada and the world.
2. It is a compelling question/problem because:
The rapidly changing technical and social aspects digital archives makes the problem complex, dynamic, and uncertain.
Finding solutions can lead to productive collaborations among archival organizations
Community members' digital contributions can enhance the holdings in digital archives
Exploring ways to make archives available to the public and researchers can enhance the services provided by digital archives
According to the Council of Canadian Academies, libraries, archives, and museums are also attractive "instruments of enjoyment." (Council of Canadian Academies. Expert...)
3. The people who are most affected by the question are:
University scholars are interested in exploring issues of information transfer and communicative connections with archived texts. (They discuss these in journals, books, and conferences.)
Librarians and archivists are interested in finding ways to increase interaction between communities and cultural archives. (They discuss these in public-facing social media, library blogs and internal reports, program and archive descriptions.)
Developers interested in producing more efficient knowledge interfaces (They discuss these in white papers, scholarly and AI interfaces.)
Administrators at memory institutions are attracted to the project because they are mandated to make archival materials more accessible, valuable, and relevant. (They discuss this in strategic plans, websites, and annual reports.)
Library patrons and the general public who are interested in enjoyable, doable projects that explore resources connected to their personal experience. (They discuss this in workshops, social media, archive groups.)
4. The answer requires certain explorations of digital texts, archives, and public forums such as the following:
Publicly available texts (housed and curated electronically as pdf files in archives, libraries, and museums)
Reviews of results of text analysis tools (AI, automated text analysis, and database retrieval tools)
Research reports from studies of archived materials (conference)
Stories and recollections from personal experiences and reminiscences (social media, knowledge forums, conferences and library gatherings)
5. The methods we will use to gather knowledge will be:
My methods will be to read published works (books and journals), attend and survey conferences in relevant scholarly disciplines, and participate in public discussions of digitally archived materials. These disciplines or areas include: education, archeology, cultural studies, library sciences, and other communication-related disciplines. The texts and discussions will be analyzed through a communicative lens--measuring information flow among participants and connectivity and networking that such communication creates. I will use categorical analysis of archived information to align resources with academic, organizational, and public needs. I will also explore websites and product reviews to analyze software and hardware tools used in digital humanities, communication studies, education, and library studies, all from the communicative perspective of scholars, policy makers, and the general public. I will survey the holdings of textbooks and other materials, which I collectively refer to as schoolbooks, in order to assess their usefulness to academic, organizational, and public needs.
6. These are the best methods to answer the question because:
These are the best methods to answer the question because they embody the discourse surrounding the use of digitally archived materials of memory institutions as it is developing in scholarly and public publications. In addition, these methods are 1) easily understood by project participants, 2) easily through digital applications, 3) allow for the building of knowledge representations of public and scholarly engagement with the materials. They also illustrate the kind of scholarly and public engagement that I hope to support in the schoolbooks project.
7. I am suited to find and analyze these resources because:
I have experience in automated text analysis and community engagement. I have had a 50-year career in language and communication related academic work, and I have conducted numerous community projects. I plan to build a network of scholars and citizens who represent various disciplines related to the pathway of 1) both scholars and citizens to 2) digital technology users of automated text analysis and to 3) librarians, knowledge keepers and archivists in memory institutions. These collaborators represent a range of communication and knowledge-oriented disciplines, each with a common focus on engaging with cultural artifacts.
8. Each specific team member's tasks support the work required to find and analyze these resources in these ways:
This is not a team project, but a network building project. If I present at conferences in communication, library science, and digital humanities, and textbook studies, I will be able to engage a multidisciplinary cadre of scholars and public intellectuals who, knowing the resources and intellectual conversations of their disciplines, will be able to speak and conduct research in schoolbooks (and other archival topics) in their areas.
9. The project will be accomplished, on time and on budget because:
Work: online and in person,
Timeframes: September to April 2023 - 2024; September to April 2024 - 2025,
Expenses:
Year 1:
Attend and present at three conferences: education focus, library archive focus, digital humanities focus. Specific conferences TBD (by 01/2024). I will travel as little as possible.
Research Assistant to archive research results and scan scholarly literature. Topics: advances in library science, textbook research, digital humanities,
Year 2:
Circulate a call for papers for a collection of scholarly and academic studies that use digital tools to access and analyze archived materials from memory institutions.
Attend 3, one-week writing retreats at the Banff Centre to write three chapters: memory institution archives (survey), digital resources for archive processing (survey), textbook research on schoolbooks (methods and survey).
Research Assistant to help with copy editing, proofreading, and author correspondence with book contributors.
The goal is to increase an understanding of the relationship of digital tools and digitally archived materials and how scholars and the public can interact with these materials to advance interdisciplinary practices in education, digital humanities, and library science toward the goal of responsible management of materials pertaining to the heritage of Canada and the world.
10. The people who will benefit from my research-results are:
1) Academic (scholars, graduate and undergraduate students) and 2) readers and library patrons and 3) librarians, archivists, and museum curators. I will provide a survey of resources and practices that will be useful to each of these groups in the 3 single-authored chapters in the first part of the book. The second part of the book will include works from academic and citizens who will create the 1) research papers for the book and 2) stories (of experiences and interaction with archives) for the book.
11. I will share my research results with each constituency in these targeted ways:
I will present talks at the three targeted 1) academic conferences, public talks at libraries locally in Edmonton but broadcast online, and a book entitled: Exploring Schoolbooks: Resources, Tools, and Examples, University of Alberta Press (first choice).
Book contents
Chapter 1: Memory Institutions and the Canadian Cultural Heritage
Chapter 2: Using Digital Tools to Explore Schoolbooks
Chapter 3: Schoolbooks: The Treasures of Canadian Education
Chapters 4 - 10: A variety of contributed studies and stories in illustrating archival research, archival analysis (communicative if possible), and textbook studies.
I will create an Internet Archive project entitled Schoolbooks as a repository (similar to the U of A's Electronic Resource Archive) that provides a DOI number for each paper, essay, story (recorded or written) that fall out of the project.
12. The results of my participatory research will be as follows:
Advances in the culture of public intellectualism
New pathways for academic and citizen science in communication studies
Visible honouring and protecting of the Canadian intangible cultural heritage
Easy to follow modelling of practices and cultural values for researchers, memory institutions, and public scholars within and outside the limited areas of textbook study.
The following sketch illustrates the connections made during the participatory research and the outcomes of the project.
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