• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• 2019-2023close
• Open Access close
• Other ORP type close
• Norwegian Open Research Archives close

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these hypotheses, we generated mitochondrial DNA and geometric morphometric data of skull and dental elements from a total of 922 North American Arctic dogs and wolves spanning over 4500 years. Our analyses revealed that dogs from Inuit sites dating from 2000 BP possess morphological and genetic signatures that distinguish them from earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and identified a novel mitochondrial clade in eastern Siberia and Alaska. The genetic legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in modern Arctic sledge dogs despite phenotypic differences between archaeological and modern Arctic dogs. Together, our data reveal that Inuit dogs derive from a secondary pre-contact migration of dogs distinct from Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and probably aided the Inuit expansion across the North American Arctic beginning around 1000 BP.

The Faro Convention underlined the importance of educational initiatives related to heritage. This paper focuses on the educational dimension of landscape, as a means to better facilitate its social acceptance and hence its inclusion in planning and management processes. The relation between landscape education and social perception, through a few European examples will be analysed to ascertain whether the principles of the Convention are being complied with effectively. The authors introduce four case studies of heritage-related education carried out in three European countries (Spain, Norway and Italy). These case studies provide the possibility to coherently analyse a wide range of activities and initiatives occurring at various scales and levels: geographic, local and sectoral. In addition, they describe the pedagogical potential of cultural landscapes and cultural heritage, and highlight some of the educational strategies and measures currently used in this field.

Fotodokumentasjon An inquiry into the limits of using images by and of other people in today’s networked, socially-mediated landscape. The project aims to situate contemporary image culture at the intersection of art, law and ethics. The point of departure is a real life incident in which the artist was accused of violating the privacy of an individual imaged in a video that was on display in her recent exhibition.

Regional clear-felling of naturally dynamic boreal forests has left remote forest landscapes in northern Europe with challenges regarding rural development based on wood mining. However, biodiversity conservation with higher levels of ambition than what is possible in regions with a long forest history, and cultural heritage, offer opportunities for developing new value chains that support rural development. We explored the opportunities for pro-active integrated spatial planning based on: (i) landscapes’ natural and cultural heritage values in the transboundary Kovda River catchment in Russia and Finland; (ii) forest canopy loss as a threat; and (iii) private, public and civil sector stakeholders’ views on the use and non-use values at local to international levels. After a 50-year history of wood mining in Russia, the remaining primeval forest and cultural heritage remnants are located along the pre-1940 Finnish-Russian border. Forest canopy loss was higher in Finland (0.42%/year) than in Russia (0.09%/year), and decreased from the south to the north in both countries. The spatial scales of stakeholders’ use of forest landscapes ranged from stand-scale to the entire catchment of Kovda River in Russia and Finland (~2,600,000 ha). We stress the need to develop an integrated landscape approach that includes: (i) forest landscape goods; (ii) other ecosystem services and values found in intact forest landscapes; and (iii) adaptive local and regional forest landscape governance. Transboundary collaboration offers opportunities for effective knowledge production and learning

In general, people are usually more reluctant to follow advice and directions from politicians who do not have their ideology. In extreme cases, people can be heavily biased in favour of a political party at the same time that they are in sharp disagreement with others, which may lead to irrational decision making and can put people’s lives at risk by ignoring certain recommendations from the authorities. Therefore, considering political ideology as a psychographic trait can improve political micro-targeting by helping public authorities and local governments to adopt better communication policies during crises. In this work, we explore the reliability of determining psychographic traits concerning political ideology. Our contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we release the PoliCorpus-2020, a dataset composed by Spanish politicians’ tweets posted in 2020. On the other hand, we conduct two authorship analysis tasks with the aforementioned dataset: an author profiling task to extract demographic and psychographic traits, and an authorship attribution task to determine the author of an anonymous text in the political domain. Both experiments are evaluated with several neural network architectures grounded on explainable linguistic features, statistical features, and state-of-the-art transformers. In addition, we test whether the neural network models can be transferred to detect the political ideology of citizens. Our results indicate that the linguistic features are good indicators for identifying finegrained political affiliation, they boost the performance of neural network models when combined with embedding-based features, and they preserve relevant information when the models are tested with ordinary citizens. Besides, we found that lexical and morphosyntactic features are more effective on author profiling, whereas stylometric features are more effective in authorship attribution.

Models that aim to capture the interactions between sediment supply, base level and tectonism recorded in fan delta successions in rift basins have not considered the stratigraphic archive preserved in interfan areas; yet interfan stratigraphy can provide a complementary record to the fan delta axes. The exhumed Early–Middle Pleistocene Kerinitis and Selinous fan deltas, in the hangingwall of the Pyrgaki–Mamoussia (P‐M) Fault, Corinth Rift, Greece, offer an ideal laboratory for the assessment of interfan architecture. Furthermore, using the geometry of adjacent present‐day fan deltas, interfans are classified into three end‐members. The classification is based on their lateral separation, which determines the degree of interfingering of topset, foreset and bottomset deposits. Qualitative (facies, stratal geometries, nature of key surfaces) and quantitative (stratigraphic thickness, bedding dip, palaeocurrents, breakpoint trajectories) data were collected in the field and from unmanned aerial vehicle photogrammetry‐based 3D outcrop models of the exhumed fan delta successions. The ancient Kerinitis–Selinous interfan architectures record: (a) initial westward progradation of the Kerinitis fan delta into the interfan area (Phase 1), (b) subsequent progradation of the Selinous fan delta into the interfan area and asymmetric growth of both fan deltas eastward (Phase 2), (c) stratal interfingering of foresets from both systems (Phase 3), and (d) relative base‐level fall, erosion and reworking of sediments into the interfan area (Phases 4 and 5). The Kerinitis–Selinous interfan evolution is linked to initial net subsidence of the P‐M Fault (Phases 1–3) and subsequent net uplift (Phases 4 and 5) resulting from a northward shift in fault activity. The interfan area provides a more complete stratigraphic record than the proximal axial areas of the fan deltas of the early stages of basin uplift, through higher preservation potential and protracted submergence. Therefore, for the most comprehensive insight into basin evolution, interfan analysis should be undertaken in concert with analysis of the fan delta axes.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Norway, like many other countries, experienced a decrease in mortality and a substantial increase in the number of health personnel. In order to assess how these changes were connected, we investigate the relationship between health personnel and mortality using data at the medical district level (N=106) covering a period of 34 years. We find a large and robust effect of midwives on reduced maternal mortality in rural areas, but no effect in urban areas. No clear effect is found for other types of health personnel or on infant mortality. The results demonstrate the important role played by public health investments during the period.

I Norge er det registrert flere hundre nedlagte kirkesteder fra middelalderen, der en betydelig andel mangler sikker stedfesting. Kirkestedene, som befinner seg over hele landet, ligger ofte i områder som i dag benyttes til andre formål, som åker, beitemark eller boligområder. Ettersom mange av lokalitetene ikke er identifisert eller avgrenset, står kildematerialet imidlertid i fare for å bli skadet, ødelagt eller fjernet som følge av moderne inngrep, erosjon eller andre naturskader. I denne artikkelen vil vi presentere resultatene fra tre georadarundersøkelser utført på de nedlagte kirkestedene Habbarstad, Furulund og Hylestad. Ut fra disse eksemplene vil vi diskutere hvordan metoden kan benyttes som verktøy for å påvise og kartlegge middelalderske kirkesteder, og ikke minst hvordan metoden kan ha relevans for forvaltningen av slike kulturminner.

Permafrost-dependent landslides occur in a range of sizes and are among the most dynamic landforms in the Arctic in the warming climate. Retrogressive thaw slumps (RTSs) are enlarging landslides triggered by thawing and release of excess water from permafrost ground ice, causing smaller or larger collapses of ground surface, which in turn exposes new permafrost to rapid thawing and collapse. In this study, a preliminary assessment of previous thaw slump activity in Nordenskiöld Land area of Svalbard is made based on remote sensing digitisation of 400 slump-scar features from aerial images from the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI). RTS properties and distribution are analysed with an emphasis on their implications for the preservation of the Svalbard’s cultural heritage (CH). Our analysis shows that the areas where RTS scars and CH co-exist in Nordenskiöld Land are, at present, limited and cover mainly areas distributed along north-west (Colesbukta, Grønfjorden, Kapp Starostin), north-east (Sassendalen and Sassenfjorden) and south-west (Van Muydenbukta) coastlines. Taking into consideration the preliminary aspect of this inventory and study, it can be stated that for now, RTS and CH sites do not have a high level of co-existence, except for eight sites which are located at less than 100 m to a RTS and one site that is located inside a currently inactive slump-scar. Further mapping of RTS will be undertaken in order to have a complete picture of these climate triggered landslides potentially threatening the Arctic CH. The results of this study, even if preliminary, can be used by local authorities and stakeholders in prioritising future documentation and mitigation measures and can thus present a powerful tool in disaster risk reduction.

The flyer-series (dataset 1HEX) departs from the existence of mathematics in literary prose—for public exposés—in the Romantic era. And from here pursues the gross-fertilisation of group-theory in art and science. Featuring the idea of disordered systems (that comes from structural geology) and the keeping of logbooks in field studies. The flyer-set uses the same knowledge basis as Rosalind Krauss in the essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field, i.a. an article on structure in mathematics by Marc Barbut in Les Temps Modernes. The argument is merological: i.e., how we can study part-whole relations in terms of restricted, principal and expanded sets.