This digital humanities project has been conceived as a template for future projects and will examine a period in history characterised by the accelerated generation of knowledge, and by simultaneous globalisation and nationalisation. The project was committed to close collaborations between historians and information scientists in order to secure new academic findings. In trans-disciplinary explorative research, reusable instruments were being developed for the analysis of large (digital) source corpora, which can cope with the semantics of diverse nineteenth century educational media and detect ‘qualitative’ structures. Such techniques, in turn, created new ways of accessing ‘mass’ sources, which mirrored and shaped the contemporary interpretation of the world and elements of cultural memory, but which are all but impenetrable using hermeneutic methods. Diachronous and synchronous analysis were employed to enable the (trans)formation of knowledge stocks and the meta analysis of the cognitive potential, and boundaries, of digital processes.