WorldViews is a multilingual, digital resource for teaching and research containing digitised textbook extracts relating to topics of inter-regional, transnational, and global significance. It is provided by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI).

The textbook extracts are selected according to globally relevant subject categories, such as "Violent Conflicts and Peace", "Constructs of Space and Belonging", or "Heterogeneity of Society" and are oriented around the Institute’s "Medium-term research projects.

The textbook excerpts originate from different textbooks from countries around the globe and from various time periods and are therefore uniquely suited to the analysis of multi-perspectivity. The material available  online may, for instance, enable researchers to review images of the self and the other, to analyse these in a historical context, and to recognise connections. The WorldViews sources reveal a certain historical fluidity in respect to regional and spatial attributions. They illustrate how bodies of knowledge and connotations can vary on a worldwide level, and how they shift over the course of time. In this respect, WorldViews reflects modern transnationally and globally oriented research concerning societal production, organisation, and circulation of knowledge as well as its cross-regional ‘translatability’, and how it is informed by various media and interwoven into historical processes. In the name of efficiency and sustainability WorldViews closely combines research, infrastructure, and transfer projects. Information scientists and cultural scholars have created an interoperable format which makes it possible to integrate data from former and ongoing GEI projects (such as EurViews or GEI-Digital) into the online source material, but also allows for textbook excerpts from future (cooperative) GEI research projects to be integrated as special collections.

The edited textbook extracts are digitised and made available online as full texts, including TEI codes, for researchers, teachers and the public. They are translated into German and English, where possible, in order to overcome language barriers, compared according to their world views, annotated by scholars, and contextualised. The priority for translation has been to follow the original language as closely as possible. Footnotes are provided by the translators and editors that draw attention to linguistic features and peculiarities.

WorldViews offers the possibility to search its data in the data formats DC (Dublin Core), TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), and CMDI (Component MetaData Infrastructure). The interface can be reached at https://worldviews.gei.de/oai.

WorldViews is viewed as a collaborative long-term project which will continually evolve. It is a digital humanities project and, as such, is conceptually aimed towards the challenges and potential of technological developments in the humanities. For example, the textbook sources are provided with CMDI metadata and delivered to CLARIN-D. There, the content can be searched using a range of linguistic resources from other research areas and there is the potential to further process the data using tools from the digital humanities. The infrastructure is designed to ensure the highest possible level of standard conformance, standardisation, and interoperability without compromising content flexibility or connectivity.

The WorldViews project was funded by the Germany Federal Ministry for Education and Research (2015-2017) and by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media.