Digital Humanities

Digital humanities has been attempted to be defined by numerous authors and in many contexts. Here we take the broad viewpoint of it as "a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods" (Digital Humanities Quarterly Journal). It lies at the intersection of ICT and humanities, which is being continually formulated by scholars and practitioners; it can include but is not limited to topics like big data, data mining, text categorization, metadata, interoperability standards, interactive visualization, GIS (Geographical Information Systems), multimedia games, digital story telling, social network analysis, bibliometrics.

Furthermore, there is a need for collaborative efforts to understand the challenges and possibilities in digital humanities, which we are trying to address with this cross-discipline and cross-sector application. As "the current landscape is multifaceted and characterized by a range of epistemic traditions and modes of engagement, and while there is a great deal of overlap and common interests, there is also a need of increased shared awareness. It could be argued that a better understanding of the landscape of the digital humanities, epistemic traditions and collaborative possibilities are vital to the further development of the field. A respectful dialogue of visions, agendas, competencies and research interests across much of this landscape can help us meet a range of exciting upcoming challenges" (Svensson 2010). As seen from participants' various input related to the short- and long-term values for them and activities which they conduct, they all belong to digital humanities; however, the challenge we would like to address with this project is to find the overlap which is the core of the field, what is the whole picture, and how to combine the "lego" pieces for addressing societal and research challenges in a more comprehensive and systematic approach.

The core idea of our proposal at this first phase (12-15 months) is to establish the foundations for the creation of a Digital Humanities initiative at the Linnaeus region, by combining some already existing expertise and resources at LNU and the wider community through input from related public and private sectors, resulting in the establishment of new top-notch research and highly skilled professionals tackling societal challenges, making LNU indeed "the university where everything is possible". In a second phase (24-48 months) this Digital Humanities initiative could grow into an even broader area based on data, information, knowledge and their relationship with technology, involving more departments, working on projects relevant to society, and creating more attractive professional courses and inter(national) programmes at master level with various specialisations. Our long-term vision is to create a leading education, development and research regional centre that combines in novel ways already existing expertise from different LNU departments and faculties working in close collaboration and co-creation with people and different organizations (both public and private sector) from the surrounding society. Addressing future societal challenges would be possible by highly skilled professionals whose education has been markedly enhanced by practice-informed education and joint, cross-sector innovation.

Strategic values to be developed during these efforts refer to uniting and consolidating the expertise we already have to create new constellations for collaboration leading to new knowledge and products (expertise, education, research, public and commercial services relevant for the region, such as a cultural tourism industry perspective), resulting in a return in investment. Our hope is that, based on the planned achievements, an important value for the general public could be a (re)-affirmation of the value of humanities in particular, and academic practices in general. Our long-term strategy is to develop a creative knowledge environment in the spirit of Linnaeus that carries out prominent development and research activities within the field of Digital Humanities both at regional and international scale, serving as a catalyst for driving a societal change with a focus on innovations and sustainable growth. All these lines of action are much aligned with LNU´s strategy as described in the document "A journey into the future: Vision and strategy 2015–2020".

• May 2024: Project proposal titled ‘The Walls Come Tumbling Down: Frontier Mythology from Rome to North America (Swedish: Väggarna faller: Gränsmytologi från Rom till Nordamerika’) coordinated by Emily Hanscam, in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Concurrences and the iInstitute, submitted to the VR and the Crafoord Foundation.
  
  
• Grant awarded for project “QUEERLIT database: Metadata Development and Searchability for LGBTQI Literary Heritage” . Led by University of Gothenburg with Linnaeus University as a key partner
• November 2020: a seminar by Annette Markham: Is speculative imagination a myth? A critical theory take on the power of anticipatory logics to limit thinking differently about digital tech futures. See video recording of the seminar.
• Erasmus+ funded project 2020-2022, Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH)
• A new KKS project to develop the Digital Humanities Master’ Program in collaboration with private and public sector.
• May 2020: This autumn, the master programme Digital Humanities will be given for the first time.
  
  
• September 2019: Digital Humanities becomes a new subject of study at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Linnaeus University
• January 2019: Call for proposals: A special issue of Education for Information on Emerging interdisciplinary curricula in the information sciences
• December 2018: Call for proposals: Higher Education Programs in Digital Humanities: Challenges and Perspectives, workshop in connection to the 4th DHN Conference, Copenhagen University, 6-8 March 2019
  
  
• December 2018: Call for proposals: Information Organization in Digital Humanities: Global Perspectives
• Digital Humanities Day with Frank Fischer, co-director of DARIAH-EU and Associate Professor for Digital Humanities at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. See a five-minute interview with Frank Fischer on "Why DARIAH?" here: https://vimeo.com/305977797
• 7 March 2018: "Higher Education Programs in Digital Humanities: Challenges and Perspectives", workshop in connection to the 3rd DHN Conference, Helsinki University, 7-9 March 2018
• 21 February 2018: "DARIAH-SWE? - Discussion around an initiative to start a national organization", meeting at Gothenburg University, Sweden.
  
  
• December 2017: Extended Papers of the International Symposium on Digital Humanities (DH 2016) are available at, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2021.
• 13 November 2017, 14:00-15:30 (H1210, Växjö) -- "Emerging Information Field, iSchools Organisation, and Potential for Linnaeus University" seminar featuring Michael Seadle and Sam Oh.The recorded video of the seminar is available at: https://connect.sunet.se/p92gwguambp/. Presentations by Sam Oh & Michael Seadle. Poster.

• Project: Nya Småland is under way

• Autumn 2017: Digital Humanities Seminars

• Spring 2017: Our first course, Programing for Digital Humanities, towards the full Master in Digital Humanities is now open for applications. 

• 14-16 March 2017: Workshop on Higher Education Programs in Digital HumanitiesChallenges and Perspectives at the 2nd DHN Conference in Gothenburg. Panel.
  
  

• 7-8 November 2016: International Digital Humanities Symposium. Book of Abstracts.Extended papers (published at CEUR-WS.org)

• Summer 2016: Digital Humanities Initiative at Linnaeus University becomes a member of the European network DARIAH-EU

Our long-term vision is to create a leading education, development and research regional centre that combines in novel ways already existing expertise from different Linnaeus University departments and faculties working in close collaboration and co-creation with people and different organizations (both public and private sector) from the surrounding society. Addressing future societal challenges would be possible by highly skilled professionals whose education has been markedly enhanced by practice-informed education and joint, cross-sector innovation.

School of Business and Economics

Department of Marketing

• Billore Soniya, Senior Lecturer

Faculty of Health and Life Sciences

Department of Health and Caring Sciences

• Rennemark Mikael, Professor

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Department of Cultural Sciences

• Ahlryd Sara, Lecturer
• Carlsson Hanna, Senior Lecturer
• Cederlöf Gunnel, Professor
• Hanell Fredrik, Senior Lecturer
• Hansson Joacim, Professor
• Marcussen Eleonor, Researcher
• Sara Ellis Nilsson, Researcher
• Petersson Bodil, Associate Professor
• Svensson Jonas, Professor
• Trulsson Åsa, Senior Lecturer

Department of Design

• Snodgrass Eric, Lecturer

Department of Film and Literature

• Bruhn Jørgen, Professor
• Brunow Dagmar, Senior Lecturer
• Forsgren Peter, Professor
• Papageorgiou Vasilis, Professor
• Schirrmacher Beate, Senior Lecturer
• Åberg Anders, Senior Lecturer

Department of Languages

• Hommerberg Charlotte, Senior Lecturer
• Höglund Johan, Associate Professor
• Laitinen Mikko, Professor
• Levin Magnus, Associate Professor
• Rosén Christina, Senior Lecturer
• Tyrkkö Jukka, Professor

Department of Media and Journalism

• Ekelin Annelie, Senior Lecturer
• De La Brosse Renaud, Professor
• Holt Kristoffer, Senior Lecturer

Department of Music and Art

• Sternudd Hans, Senior Lecturer
• Strinnholm Lagergren Karin, Senior Lecturer

Department of Swedish

• Ohlsson Claes, Lecturer

Faculty of Technology

Department of Computer Science and Media Technology

• Alissandrakis Aris, Senior Lecturer
• Jusufi Ilir, Senior Lecturer
• Kerren Andreas, Professor
• Nordmark Susanna, Doctoral Student
• Mirijamdotter Anita, Professor
• Jeff Winter, Senior Lecturer

The University Library

• Barck Jonas, Administration Leader
• Carlsson Juhlin Helena, Section Manager
• Gunnarsson Ingemar, Research Strategist
• Gunnarsson Ted, Librarian

ASIA

China

• Gao Jianbo, Distinguished Professor, Founding Director, Institute of Complexity Science and Big Data Technology, Guangxi University, China

AUSTRALIA

• Anderson Theresa, University of Technology Sydney
• Verhoven Deb, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University

EUROPE

Austria

• Reichert Ramón, University of Vienna, Department for Theatre, Film and Media Studies

Bulgaria

• Dobrev Dobromir, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski
• Ilieve Dimitar, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski

Croatia

• Pehar Franjo, Department of Information Science, University of Zadar
• Skrbic Alempijevic Nevena , Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
• Tomic Marijana, Department of Information Science, University of Zadar
• Zauder Kresimir, Department of Information Science, University of Zadar

Denmark

• Ping Huang Marianne, Developer Cultural Creative Collaborations and Digital Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University
• Roued-Cunliffe Henriette, Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen

Finland

• Grufstedt Ylva, Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki
• Mäkelä Eetu, Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, University of Helsinki, University of Oxford
• Paju Petri, Department of Cultural History, University of Turku
• Paavolainen Maija, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki
• Tolonen Mikko, Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki

France

• Ibekwe-Sanjuan Fidelia, School of Communication & Journalism, Aix-Marseille University

Germany

• Loist Skadi, Faculty of Arts, University of Rostock

Ireland

• Hoare Cathal, University College Cork

Italy

• Carbé Emmanuela, University of Pavia
• Tomasi Francesca, Department of Philology and Italian studies, University of Bologna

Norway

• Bergsland Andreas, Music Technology Program, Department of Music, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
• Conzett Philipp, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
• Hansen Thomas Sørlie, Faculty of Humanities, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
• Rockenberger Annika, Department of Literature, University of Oslo
• Tallerås Kim, Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science, University of Oslo and Akershus University College

Portugal

• Olívia Pestana, professor, Department of Communication and Information Sciences, University of Porto, Portugal

Slovenia

• Merčun Kariž Tanja, Department of Library and Information Science and Book studies, University of Ljubljana

Sweden

• Lund Arwid, Södertörns Högskola 
• Dutceac Segesten Anamaria, European Studies, Center for Language and Literature, Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology, Lund University
• Foka Anna, Associate Senior Lecturer, HUMlab, Umeå University
• Lindhé Cecilia, Centre for Digital Humanities, Gothenburg University
• Lloyd Annemaree, Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås
• Lund Anna, Associate Professor, Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University; Faculty Fellow, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University (USA)
• Maric Jasmina, Senior lecturer, The Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås
• Nilsson Hammar Anna, Department of History, Lund University
• Quinon Paula, Department of Philosophy, The Faculties of Humanities and Theology, Lund University
• Sköld Olle, Library and Information Science, Department of ABM, University of Uppsala
• Åhlfeldt Johan, Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University (see also http://dare.ht.lu.se, http://monastica.ht.lu.se, http://projekt.ht.lu.se/nyckeln)

United Kingdom

• Pidd Michael, Digital Director of HRI Digital at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

NORTH AMERICA

United States of America

• Deyrup Marta M., University Libraries, Seton Hall University
• Minimair Manfred, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Seton Hall University
• Morgan Paige C., Digital Humanities Librarian, University of Miami Libraries
• Tangherlini Timothy, The Scandinavian Section and Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles

SOUTH AMERICA

Brazil

• Queiroz João, Institute of Arts and Design, Federal University of Juiz de Fora

Ecuador

• Wills-Espinosa Nicola, Dean at Faculty of Human Ecology, Education and Development, Casa Grande University
• Zerega María Mercedes, Vice chancellor at Casa Grande University

AFRICA
Tunisia

• Tunisia Broadcasting Authority

EUROPE

Croatia

•  Kuzman Šlogar Koraljka, The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research

Sweden

• Hector Nils, Kafé de Luxe
• Unander Nordle Diana, Information Engineering Center, Research and collaboration project, Linnaeus University
• Samuelsson Björn, Culture and Leisure Department, Kalmar Municipality
• Jonsson-Malm Carolina, Center for Applied Cultural Heritage at Kalmar County Museum
• Westas Bo, DiK, Professional association and a trade union for university graduates in the fields of culture and communication
• Ozkoray Norton, Communications consultan
• Hartman Peter, Entrepreneur
• Billore Gautam, private consultant
• Axelsson Lennart, AV-Media, Region Kronoberg
• Lundquist Maria, Biblioteksutveckling Blekinge Kronoberg (BiBK)
• Sundell Weine, Biblioteksutveckling Blekinge Kronoberg (BiBK)
• Stiernspetz Nylén Alexandra, Det Fria Ordets Hus
• Gunnarsson Fredrik, Kalmar County Museum
• Victor Helena, Kalmar County Museum
• Nordmark Håkan, Kulturparken Småland
• Boström Mathias, Smålands Musikarkiv
• Robert Bunjaku, Växjö City Library
• Skogberg Daniel, Växjö Kommun
• Sandblad Fredrik, Växjö Kommun
• Sofie Magnusson, CEO, Huseby Bruk

NORTH AMERICA

United States of America

• Saylor Nicole, Head of the American Folklife Center Archive at the Library of Congresse

AUSTRALIA

• McGarth Ann, Director of Australian Centre for Indigenous History, School of History, ANU College of Arts & Social Science

EUROPE

Croatia

• Aparac Jelušić Tatjana, Distinguished Professor, University of Zadar, founder of Joint Master Programme Written heritage in the Digital Environment at the University of Zadar and Osijek, Croatia; co-founder of Libraries in the Digital Age conferences; Founder of the international PhD programme in Information Sciences, together with UCLA and Rutgers

Sweden

• Göransson Elisabet, Researcher, Centre for Theology and Religious Studies; Associate Professor, Centre for Languages and Literature
• Huvila Isto, Department of Archives, Libraries, Museums, Uppsala University
• Haider Jutta, Advisor role till October 2016 due to external factors; Associate Professo, Information Studies, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund university
• Dahlström Mats, Senior Lecturer, Swedish School of Library and Information Science
• Gelfgren Stefan, Director of Humanities Lab, Umeå University

United Kingdom

• Hughes Lorna, Professor in Digital Humanities, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow
• Winters Jane, Professor of Digital Humanities, School of Advanced Study, University of London

• Mikko Laitinen, Professor, Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

  Mikko Laitinen is currently on a partial leave of absence from Linnaeus University and works as Professor of English Language at the University of Eastern Finland. Laitinen holds PhD in English philology in the University of Helsinki (2007), where he worked at the Academy of Finland funded Centre of Excellence in the Study of Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG). He is one of the two founding members of Data-Intensive Sciences and Applications (DISA), a multidisciplinary consortium involving computer scientists, mathematicians, and social scientists. His research interests include corpus linguistics and digital tools in linguistics and variationist approaches to English as a lingua franca (ELF). Laitinen's research focuses on understanding language contact and emerging variability in the digital age. It seeks to combine traditional philological data with real-time data and to develop and apply new methods to enrich and visually analyze natural language data streams that are large in scope and rich in metadata to gain novel insights on language variability in social context. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles including contributions in Language Variation and Change, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and Journal of Universal Computing. Laitinen has worked in several language corpora projects. He is currently working with building the first second-generation ELF corpora, the Corpus of Written English Texts in Sweden/Finland (SWE-CE and FIN-CE), and is developing tools for new third-generation ELF corpora that consist of real-time data streams of text and metadata from social media platforms, such as Twitter. His recent publications in digital humanities include is studies that focus on the weak social tie model of linguistic change. This model has been tested on very small ethnographic networks, and these studies operationalize weak ties using circa 200,000 accounts and 10 million individual tweets and their automatically-generated metadata parameters to test whether the weak tie model also holds in big data. They serve to illustrate what type of new answers to traditional questions could be gained by using new types of 'big data' evidence in humanities.

• Christina Rosén, Senior lecturer, Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

  Christina Rosén's current research is focusing onto the comparison of the of digital learning tools in German and Swedish schools. She has published an article in 2017: A cross-cultural study of attitudes to digital tools among students and teachers in the European language classroom.
  Rosén thinks there is a need for more research in this field and the comparison Germany - Sweden is especially interesting as the attitudes to digital tools differ a lot. In Sweden, is believed that everything in society can be solved with the help of digitalization. In Germany, they put pedagogy first. This goes for all areas from education to banking. Where we put technology first the Germans put the human beings first. This is what should be the focus also in Digital Humanities (DH) in her opinion.
  Rosén thinks that internet should be a tool to approaching students and that discussion on the best possible ways to do so is needed. She is asking to what extent are teachers in schools and at universities given time and opportunity to learn and practice ICT before including it in their teaching, before developing digital learning tools? There is a serious lack of pre-service and in-service teacher training and good educational material and we should take the responsibility for this as we are researchers educating teachers.

• Beate Schirrmacher, Senior lecturer, Department of Film and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

  Beate Schirrmacher's research circles around intermedial questions. How and when do we perceive literature as a medium interacting with other media? In which aspects does intermedial interaction build on and highlight the similarities of the media involved? How can we apply intermedial methods in teaching? How can intermedial theory address and answer crucial problems on digitization and the increasing complexities of mediated communication in society? Schirrmacher is currently exploring different tensions that arise between different forms of narration, giving testimony and bearing witness. She has recently finished a project on the common ground of music and violence, which highlights aspects of affect and performance in the texts, and I continue to explore relations of performance, performativity and mediation.
  For the past several years, she has been interested in intermedial relations between literature and music, where she explored the poetological role of music in the writings of and Günter Grass as well as the relation of performative language and performance of music in Elfriede Jelinek's writings. She would like to find ways how to combine the Digital Humanities (DH) approach to research with medial theoretical questions from intermedial and media studies as I consider that the two would profit from one another.

• Annelie Ekelin, Senior lecturer, Department of Media and Journalism, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

  Annelie Ekelin's current research is mainly about local journalism and democracy development. The purpose with the Regpress Project (Regional press project) was to understand the role of regional media in southeast Sweden where the regional press has had a strong presence and importance in regional life since 1841. This differs from other parts of Sweden and is therefore interesting to investigate further. Ekelin's research had an audience perspective and focused on the participatory aspects of the relation between the local press and also the integration of digital media and traditional print media, and how the users make use of both resources. They have recently received new funding for a follow up project focusing upon local quality journalism development, new dimensions of the reading public and more personalised regional press consumption and how this interacts with place and community based deliberation and participation. Ekelin is also having small bits in other projects focusing norm critical methods development and alternative communication as well as analysis of new media formats. She is also part of the initiative Agent-based models and memory preservation with Giangiacomo Bravo, Cornelius Holtorf, Henrik Hultman and others. Ekelin says she has difficulties at moments to see the connection between her research and Digital Humanities (DH) since she is working with a focus on empirical studies, to some extent data-driven, but mainly focusing qualitative methods. She adds that she is open for collaboration, but have difficulties to find time for furthering the development and participation. She sees DH initiative at Linnaeus university (LNU) interesting but still in the process of developing and reaching out to the staff on LNU and also to set up new collaborative projects, including a variation of perspectives rather than trying to adapt to one single perspective.

• Jukka Tyrkkö, Professor, Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

  Jukka Tyrkkö works primarily on various aspects of English linguistics and, to some extent, contrastive linguistics and multilingualism. Within those fields, Tyrkkö has a wide range of research topics such as pattern-driven approaches to language variation and chance, especially lexis and phraseology; studies of political discourse; studies of specialised languages, such a medical writing; and most recently corpus-based studies of translation and educational linguistics. He enjoys collaborating with colleagues from other fields, such as library science, political and social sciences, computer science and psychology.
  Most of Tyrkkö's research involves the use of large corpora, developing corpus tools, visualizing language data, and using a variety of computational and statistical methods in the analysis of language. In addition to purely linguistic work, he has a long history of working on corpus annotation methods for rich philological data and contextual metadata, integrating multimodal data into linguistic corpora, working in archives and scholarly libraries, etc.
  Tyrkkö says that Digital Humanities (DH) is a growing field here at LNU as it at most universities, and we have made some nice progress in some areas. From the humanities perspective, the challenge for us, and this is a challenge in most places, is that it can be difficult for humanities scholars with less experience of computational methods to get assistance, or to compete for funding if the criteria is set exclusively by the standards of computer science. I would strongly advocate developing a DH lab or service point of some kind, where humanities scholars could discuss their ideas and needs with colleagues (or mid to advanced level students) in computer science, find assistance and learn about new approaches and opportunities that they might not have even thought about before.

• Renaud de La Brosse, Professor, Department of Media and Journalism, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

  Renaud de La Brosse's current research focuses on the ambivalent relations existing between media and terrorism. His standing point is that the core of terror is to circulate insecurity and fear. The methods are similar to those in war; wound and kill the enemy, hit symbolic targets and impose own rules by force. For sure, the division between periods of peace and war are more diffuse in these times of violent threats, actions of war. Where will there be an explosion next?
  As a consequence, just like in times of war, times of terror divide people into 'we' and 'them'. "We need to protect ourselves against them", this strong will is expressed both by politicians and citizens. But the ways of protection differ. Some societies respond with vengeance - violent and brutal vengeance adding to the spiral of violence.
  Some threatened societies respond by limiting movement like imposing State of emergency, as witnessed in France. It seems like all societies limit human rights in different ways, especially rights protecting freedom of expression and information. Politicians also, in democratic societies like Sweden and the EU, feed this.
  As a result, the negative spiral for free media is spinning; reporting on terrorism might lead to limitations of human rights like freedom of speech. It is important to be aware of ways and means the different parties in conflicts use to involve journalists to be their tools. It appears vital that we learn more about how terror, terrorism and terrorists, in a journalistic context, are used and the consequences of it.
  In relation to his research topic, de La Brosse sees possible tracks of collaboration within the project for Digital Humanities (DH): one has to admit that today social media have fallen into the hands of terrorist groups, in the sense that the latter use them to reach their mortified goals. Many credit was granted yesterday to the so-called liberating power of social networks, the fact is that today they frighten for their possible destructive power. Therefore, this project could also aim at collecting and analysing messages of propaganda, hate and stigmatization, spread through social networks.
  Depending the possibility of funding, de La Brosse sees DH as the platform where the conjunction of knowledge from different fields could occur, and where some collective work could be done in collaboration with colleagues belonging to the fields of linguistic, informatics, media technology as well as library and information science.

• Vasilis Papageorgiou, Professor, Department of Film and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

• Jonas Svensson, Professor, Department of Cultural Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

• Dagmar Brunow, Senior lecturer, Department of Film and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

Dagmar Brunow’s research project “The Cultural Heritage of the Moving Image (VR 2016-2018)” deals with issues of curating online access to digitised collections in national film archives in times of diversity policies. Brunow thinks that connection between the research and Digital Humanities (DH) lies in issues of digitisation and metadata-ing adding she sees DH initiative at Linnaeus university ambitious and hard-working.

• Cecilia Trenter, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

Cecilia Trenter’s current research question how the commemoration of HIV and AIDS relates to the bio political status of the virus and pandemic (1985–2017). The project will primarily focus on the US, Australia, Sweden and South Africa. The justification for the selected areas is that activism in the US early addressed the virus in terms of politics of health and identity, Australia developed an efficient health-policy programme quite early during the pandemic, Sweden has never had a high number of infected persons but until 2011 it had the world’s strictest legislation on breach of the duty to provide information. South Africa and the commemoration of AIDS/HIV is characterized by silence and denial. Trenter says that the main sources are from the digital archive The Face of AIDS film archive, with 600 hours of material filmed in 40 countries over a period of 35 years, about 1800 videos documenting HIV/AIDS by Swedish filmmaker Staffan Hildebrand. Additionally, sources are debates in media and representation in popular culture such as documentaries and fiction. Trenter says that Digital Humanities (DH) is an important platform for interdisciplinary collaboration that enables new, alternative, complementary perspectives on research. One can accuse DH of being too wide and unspecified, but I think the broad estimate is a strength.

• Arwid Lund, Senior lecturer, Department of Cultural Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

Arwid Lund's current research is about open data, and more generally the political, ideological and economical aspects of openness in relation to digital production and culture of all sorts. Lund says that his research comes very close to the Digital Humanities (DH) and can hopefully strengthen a perspective of critical theory in relation to it. Lund's aim is to be a part of a multi-disciplinary co-operation to develop new educational initiatives as well as research projects with a critical perspective on Digital Humanities.

• Soniya Billore, Senior lecturer, Department of Marketing, School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University

Soniya Billore's current research is about International Business, Innovation and Cross-cultural consumer behaviour. Billore see her research, mainly in International business, with the utilization of Big Data. How do companies, especially SMEs use Big data and what can be done with the relationship, present and prospective. Billore thinks that Digital Humanities (DH) is useful for business studies since business is a part of every initiative that companies adopt. DH could impact business models of companies and it can be therefore developed as a special area of research and pedagogy at the university too.

• Magnus Levin, Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University

 My current research in language change and variation is conducted within the research environment Linnaeus University Centre for Data Intensive Sciences & Applications. This includes studies of how English is used in the Nordic countries. My research in translation analysis concerns the translation of phraseological and morphological phenomena such as light verb constructions (e.g. take a look / in Auftrag geben) and complex modifiers (e.g. do-it-yourself (books)), for example from English into Swedish and German. This corpus-based research investigates strategies used by translators and the characteristics of translated language. Contemporary linguistics is increasingly related to digital humanities by the use of large (and messy) or small (and tidy) data sets.