New frontiers in research on the material culture of school: the Cata-LOH Project

Abstract

Artificial intelligence meets primary historical sources – specifically the commercial catalogues of companies
producing school materials – to unlock hitherto unexplored potential in the study of educational artefacts. Cata-
LOH (Catalogues for Researching Learning Objects and their History) is an innovative system capable of providing
customized responses and offering thousands of new research data points, both on the identification of
didactic objects and on the wide range of multidisciplinary information contained within, and revealed by, the
catalogues themselves. Currently based on a corpus of 98 catalogues published between 1880 and 1994, Cata-
LOH has already extracted data on 55,000 historical teaching objects, thus providing the scholarly community
with information derived from an objective and philologically grounded primary source. This contribution helps to address a significant gap in the identification and classification data of historical teaching aids. In addition,
Cata-LOH aims to innovate the methodological approach to documentary primary sources within the field of
studies on the history of the material culture of schools.