• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• 2017-2021close
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What does an anthropologist’s archive look like? Where is it located? And is the anthropology of archives important for the understanding of anthropological thinking today? Here we answer these questions by analysing the various life histories of the archival fragments of one of the most puzzling and influential anthropologists in the history of Russian and Soviet anthropology: Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff (1887–1939). Shirokogoroff is credited as being one of the authors of the etnos theory — one of the main instruments of identity politics in Russia, China, Germany and also, in part, Japan and South Africa. The transnational life histories of Shirokogoroff and his wife Elizaveta [Elizabeth] Nikolaevna (1884–1943), and of their ideas, suggests a conception of the archive not as a single whole, but instead as a collection of forgotten, hidden, obliterated, or, on the other hand, scrupulously preserved fragments. These fragments are not centred in one place or organized around any one reading, but they nevertheless represent “partial connections”. Moreover, as we can see today with hindsight, none of these archival fragments lay inert. They have been intertwined in local political and social ontologies. Our text has an autoethnograpic quality. While illustrating separate episodes from the life of the Shirokogoroffs we also will tell of our search for the manuscripts through which we were forced onto strange paths and encounters. These greatly deepened our understanding both of the life of documents and their material links to the lives of researchers. Our article is an attempt to illustrate this complex picture which, in the end, will allow us to conclude that we have only just begun to understand the workings of the anthropologist’s archive in the history of anthropological thought. QC 20220530

Can walking trails be understood not only as routes to history and heritage, but also as heritage in and of themselves? The paper explores the articulation of trails as a distinct landscape and mobility heritage, bridging the nature-culture divide and building on physical and intellectual movements over time. The authors aim to contribute to a better understanding of the geography of trails and trailscapes by analysing the emergence of the Swedish-Norwegian trail Finnskogleden. The trail is situated in the border region spanning the former county of Hedmark in present-day Innlandet County, south-eastern Norway, and Värmland County in mid-western Sweden, a forested area where Finnish-speaking immigrants settled from the 16th century to the early 20th century. Archives, literature, interviews, and field visits were used to analyse the emergence and governance of the trail. The main finding is the importance of continuous articulation work by local and regional stakeholders, through texts, maps, maintenance, and mobility. In conclusion, the Finn forest trailscape and its mobility heritage can be seen as an articulation of territory over time, a multilayered process drawing on various environing technologies, making the trail a transformative part of a trans-border political geography. Rörelsearvet: stigar och leder i hållbar och inkluderande kulturarvsförvaltning

We present an online API to access a number of Natural Language Processing services developed at KTH. The services work on Swedish text. They include tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, compound word analysis, word inflection, lemmatization, spelling error detection and correction, grammar checking, and more. The services can be accessed in several ways, including a RESTful interface, direct socket communication, and premade Web forms. The services are open to anyone. The source code is also freely available making it possible to set up another server or run the tools locally. We have also evaluated the performance of several of the services and compared them to other available systems. Both the precision and the recall for the Granska grammar checker are higher than for both Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The evaluation also shows that the recall is greatly improved when combining all the grammar checking services in the API, compared to any one method, and combining services is made easy by the API. QC 20230328

Advanced NLP models require huge amounts of data from various domains to produce high-quality representations. It is useful then for a few large public and private organizations to join their corpora during training. However, factors such as legislation and user emphasis on data privacy may prevent centralized orchestration and data sharing among these organizations. Therefore, for this specific scenario, we investigate how gossip learning, a massively-parallel, data-private, decentralized protocol, compares to a shared-dataset solution. We find that the application of Word2Vec in a gossip learning framework is viable. Without any tuning, the results are comparable to a traditional centralized setting, with a reduction in ground-truth similarity scores as low as 4.3%. Furthermore, the results are up to 54.8% better than independent local training. QC 20210423

The patterns of syntactic differentiation and their causes and effects are fundamental to space syntax analysis. Often, however, differentiation is taken for granted with no reference to the dynamic process that brings it about. Here, we first show that by measuring the amount of syntactic differentiation, we can better distinguish between types of street networks. We then show that repeated local transformations of a regular street grid lead to different yet largely predictable trajectories of differentiation depending upon the rules used. Finally, we show that different paths to differentiation entail different costs in terms of undesirable properties. This allows us to better assess the likely consequences of design moves and their appropriateness relative to design intentions. QC 20210614

AbstractEmerging after World War II “the environment” as a modern concept turned in the years around 1970 into a phase of institutionalization in science, civic society, and politics. Part of this was the foundation of journals. The majority became “environmental specialist journals”, typically based in established disciplines. Some became “environmental generalist journals”, covering broad knowledge areas and often with an ambition to be policy relevant. A significant and early member of the latter category was Ambio, founded 1972. This article presents an overview of the journal’s first 50 years, with a focus on main changes in scientific content, political context, and editorial directions. A key finding is that the journal reflects an increasing pluralization of “the environment” with concepts such as global change, climate change, Earth system science, Anthropocene, resilience, and environmental governance. Another finding is that the journal has also itself influenced developments through publishing work on new concepts and ideas.

AbstractThe “Arctic Uchronotopias” special issue of Polar Record is an important contribution to scholarly reflection on resource extraction. The ideas, perspectives, and empirical cases that we encounter have significance for extractivism wherever it takes place, both inside and outside of the Arctic region. To see extractivism through an Arctic lens is particularly useful since it brings up many of the issues that are often at stake in extraction activities, but not always at the same time: geopolitics, transboundary relations, environmental and climate impacts, cultural and natural heritage, indigenous relations, rights issues, local and regional development, and lives and fates of communities. Above all, these papers bring out the full spectrum of issues and tensions related to ongoing major global shifts, such as the Great Acceleration and Overheating, and those transformations of which resource extraction forms a major part. The research presented in Arctic Uchronotopias demonstrates that affect and emotions have explanatory value in the geopolitics of Arctic resource extraction. It also shows that emotional and cognitive experience and wisdom carry values and properties that conventional Environmental Impact Assessments and other technologies of evaluation and decision-making can capture.

De senaste decennierna har ”digital humaniora” nämnts i otaliga sammanhang och kommit att påverka litteraturvetenskaplig utbildning och forskning – trots att begreppets innebörd alltjämt är omdebatterad. Är det en ny disciplin eller specialisering av forskning och undervisning som redan bedrivs? På vilka sätt hänger digital humaniora ihop med samhällets och universitetens datorisering? Är det ett svar på hur litteraturen kan förstås i en digitaliserad värld, eller en fingervisning om litteraturvetenskapens framtid? För att reda i begreppen bjöd TFL-redaktionen in till ett panelsamtal via videolänk, av och med Karl Berglund (Uppsala universitet), Oscar Jansson (Lunds universitet) och Lina Rahm (KTH). QC 20220607

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