Schnittstelle: Digital Humanities

In the German-speaking countries, academic research into historical books for children began relatively late. This late entry was not without consequences for the discourses of cultural and literary studies. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, books for children were not even systematically collected by research institutions and libraries, which partially explains why the desiderata in research questions are correspondingly high. The development of new methods in the field of Digital Humanities offers much opportunity for research in the genre of historical nonfiction for children and youths, as well as in its subgenres. To illustrate this point, the following article outlines the potential of Digital Humanities to enhance the research on visual material in historical nonfiction books for children. It also points out the general interfaces between Digital Humanities and research in children’s literature, and links them with practical experience from an interdisciplinary research project. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that using digital analysis as a research method has an added benefit: it can enhance the indexing of the corpus of historical nonfiction books for children and youths, which is yet to be created. Through these methods the scholarly discussion could be revitalized, reorganized, and structured in innovative ways. But even in the future, machine analysis cannot fully supplant scholarly expertise. The data collected will continue to require the support of discursive research.