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Part of book: ISBN 978-1-009-10023-6QC 20221219

Extractivism has been predominant in the Arctic since whaling and sealing campaigns began in the sixteenth century, followed by mining and drilling for oil and gas. In this chapter we present some of the main features of this ‘extractivist history’ of the circumpolar region. We organize this development along a set of themes. First, we explore the extractive frame of mind in Western thought and how it has continued to shape visions of the region. Second, we explore the material and social impacts of historical extractivism. Third, we use the theoretical lens of colonialism and decolonialism to understand the social and political relations, especially with aboriginal populations. Fourth, we examine the, often fraught, recent and contemporary debates around contemporary and future extractivism and its implications for the Arctic. The historical overview serves the purpose of providing a legible pattern from what is also a range of diverse and rich variations. A key finding is that extractivism is a lasting legacy and a path dependency of the region. At the same time resource extraction has many problematic sides that the seeking of new Arctic futures will have to deal with. QC 20221215Chapter in book: ISBN 978-1-009-10023-6

Part of book: ISBN 978-1-009-10023-6QC 20221219

This chapter explores knowledge associated with the humanities that hasbeen developed in practice-oriented research domains of the Swedishgovernment to help solve societal challenges. I study the Swedish NationalDefense Research Establishment [Försvarets forskningsanstalt] (FOA). Theconcept of “borderline humanities” refers to research activities that didnot abide by academic distinctions between the humanities, the socialsciences, and the natural sciences. The study shows how knowledge onhuman culture, history, language, and beliefs developed in a researchenvironment that drew on diverse fields of both research and practice.The chapter brings to the fore shared themes and concepts betweendifferent research fields and draws attention to how this affects the viewof research impact. Part of book: ISBN 978-90-485-5502-4QC 20220815

This chapter explores how the American mountaineer and geographer Walter Abbott Wood built a personal and institutional legacy in the St Elias Mountains between Yukon and Alaska. After his early experience as part of the “golden age” of United States mountaineering in Alaska, Wood participated in cold-weather warfare research during World War II, followed by a research program in glaciology (Operation Snow Cornice) under the auspices of the Arctic Institute of North America (AINA). Wood’s personal connections to the region only deepened with the 1951 death of his wife and daughter in the mountains, and they took their most concrete form in the Icefield Ranges Research Programme, co-sponsored by AINA, which grew during the 1960s and early 1970s from a glacier-focused venture to a study of the total environment of the region from a base camp at Kluane Lake. The chapter examines how Wood’s personal attachment to the region mapped onto contemporary military imperatives, particularly for knowledge of human physiological reactions at high altitudes, and why this prompted speculation in Canada about connections to US military plans in south and east Asia. The creation of the Kluane Lake National Park in 1972 coincided with a shift toward research focused more on life than earth sciences and with Wood’s own retirement from active involvement at the site. A strand that runs throughout the chapter is the nature of Wood’s inscription of his own ambitions on to the mountains - and how that facilitated, and perhaps even necessitated, an erasure of the First Nations wholived in and around the Kluane Lake region. While the continuing AINA presence at Kluane Lake no longer ignores First Nations, the chapter concludes that reflecting on how legacies are made and personal connections inscribed on landscapes must involve consideration of structural visibility and invisibility. QC 20230614 ERC StG 716211

This article discusses David Lowenthal's last book, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge, which was published posthumously by Routledge in 2019 (available in print from November 2018). The book is based on a series of lectures that he gave while a visiting fellow with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm in 2012. Aimed at a general academic audience, it is an erudite and passionate overview showing how ingrained bias towards unity or diversity shapes major issues in education, religion, genetics, race relations, heritage governance, and environmental policy. Quest for the Unity of Knowledge explores the Two Cultures debate, initiated by C.P. Snow, concerning the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. It covers areas such as conservation, ecology, history of ideas, museology, landscape, and heritage studies, aligning with Lowenthal's career-long research interests, and serving as well as a meta-comment to the emerging Environmental Humanities. QC 20220412

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

In the late twentieth century, as the United Nations struggled to come up with a new legal system for the oceans, one woman saw the opportunity to promote radical new ideas of justice and internationalism. Ocean governance expert Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1918–2002) spent decades working with the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention. Throughout this sprawling series of global conferences, she navigated allegiances and enmities, intrigues and setbacks, fighting determinedly to develop a just ocean order. Featuring extensive research and new interviews with Mann Borgese’s colleagues and family, this book explores timeless questions of justice and international collaboration and asks whether the extraordinary drive and vision of a single person can influence the course of international law. QC 20220412

Podcasts are an exponentially growing audio medium where useful and relevant content should be served, which requires new methods of information sorting. This thesis is the first to look into the state-of-art problem of segmenting podcasts into chapters (structurally and topically coherent sections). Podcast segmentation is a more difficult problem than segmenting structured text due to spontaneous speech and transcription errors from automatic speech recognition systems. This thesis used author-provided timestamps from podcast descriptions as labels to perform supervised learning. Binary classification is performed on sentences from podcast transcripts. A general framework is delivered for creating a dataset with 21 436 podcast episodes, training a supervised model, and for evaluation. The framework managed to address technical challenges such as a high data imbalance (there are few chapter transitions per episode), and finding an appropriate context size (how many sentences are shown to the model during inference). The proposed model outperformed a baseline model in quantitative metrics and in a human evaluation with 100 transitions. The solution provided in this thesis can be used to chapterize podcasts, which has many downstream applications, such as segment sorting, summarization, and information retrieval. Podcasts är ett exponentiellt växande ljudmedium där användbart och relevant innehåll är viktigt, vilket kräver nya metoder för sortering av information. Detta examensarbete är det första projektet som antar utmaningen att segmentera podcasts in i kapitel (strukturellt och tematiskt sammanhängande avsnitt). Podcastsegmentering är ett svårare problem än att segmentera strukturerad text på grund av spontant tal och fel i transkriberingssystem. Detta projekt använde kapiteltider från podcastbeskrivningar som signaler för att kunna göra supervised learning. Binär klassificering görs på meningar från podcast-transkript. Denna uppsats levererar ett ramverk för att skapa ett dataset med 21 436 podcasts, träna en supervised maskininlärningsmodell samt för utvärdering. Ramverket lyckades lösa tekniska utmaningar såsom obalanserad data (det är få kapitelövergångar i varje podcast) och att hitta en rimlig kontextstorlek (hur många meningar som modellen ser för varje inferens). Den tränade modellen var bättre än en slumpmässig referensmodell i både kvantitativa mätningar samt i en mänsklig utvärdering för 100 kapitelövergångar. Slutligen, detta examensarbete har resulterat i en lösning som kan kapitelindela podcasts, vilket har många applikationer såsom sortering av segment, summering, och informationssökning.