Framing History: Identifying and Aligning Historical Narratives from Diverse Text Books
Timing: 2025
Funding: 2025 Bonn-Melbourne Research Excellence Fund
About the Project: A much quoted saying states that "History is written by the victors". This implies that records of historical events are not (merely) a collection of facts, but that these facts are subjected to the interpretation of the author. This project will tease apart this "interpretation" from the facts on the basis of a large collection of history books. To do so, it will draw on natural language processing and computational social science to identify parallel historical narratives in an existing digitized data set of 46 high school history textbooks published between 1948 and 1989 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). We will develop novel methods to align the descriptions of the same event across text books; and expose and analyse differences in the framing of these events across the two countries. We will relate our findings to established measures of political indoctrination in the GDR. We will also develop an exploratory tool accessible to the general public. Our methods will be general, and support the analysis of the framing of parallel narratives more broadly, for instance across news articles about the same event from different ideological sources.