This article is a summary of the doctoral thesis ‘Performing search: search engines and mobile devices in the everyday life of young people’, defended and published at Lund University in June 2021.

In this article, I present results from recent ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Scandinavian museums, focusing on visitors’ attitudes towards the display of human remains. While the dead body can elicit fear, sorrow, or disgust in other contexts, participant observations show that most visitors seem indifferent to the presence of bodies in museums. Drawing on anthropologist Annemarie Mol’s research on the “multiple” nature of the body, I attribute this indifference to the ability of the museum space to transform the remains from abject corpses into viable museum objects. In line with Media Studies scholar Katherine Goodnow, I see the museum as a genre recognizable to visitors; a genre in which human remains traditionally have a place as objects on display. Through ethnographic examples, I show how upholding this genre determines whether we see remains as belonging in a morgue or mausoleum – or in a museum.

Bobcatsss är en biblioteks- och informationsvetenskapskonferens som anordnas årligen av studenter. Årets tema var läsning och författaren berättar här om några intressanta föredrag och infallsvinklar som inspirerade denne. Konferensen hölls i Riga och författaren besökte bland annat Lettlands nya nationalbibliotek och världsarvet Vecrīga, Rigas historiska centrum

This article aims to illustrate the relationship between museum success and community engagement within the broader field of the intersection of memory-space-healing and national traumas all over the world. Museum success is in this case defined as a functioning museum which engages with content and receives a large number of visitors, and is accepted by and engages with its community. We have included an analysis of two South African museums that focus on elements of the apartheid past, in order to explore the architectural, institutional and social dynamics that are at play when a museum has to deal with difficult subject matter in a complex physical context. We look at relevant literature from South African architectural and museum publications, as well as work by international cultural heritage authors. We also include visual and descriptive analysis of two case studies. The focus is on the District Six Museum in Cape Town and the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth and their roles, as institutions and buildings, in post-conflict recon- ciliation. Additional examples are investigated in terms of archi- tectural design, display design, and institutional culture. We draw conclusions based on the complex post-apartheid context wherein these museums function. The main conclusions are first linked to how a museum is introduced into a community and second, how the engagement with the community is managed. We argue that these two factors may impact directly on the survival of the museum. The Red Location Museum serves as an example of a breakdown of these relationships. 

Föreliggande artikel består av sammanfattningen av avhandlingen Resources for scholarly documentation in professional service organizations - A study of Swedish development-led archaeology report writing, försvarad och publicerad vid Uppsala universitet i december 2017. Avhandlingens kappa finns fritt tillgänglig i DiVA (http://www.diva-portal.org).

This article aims to illustrate how media technologies affect library design through the consideration of media technologies as an actor in a network and the effects of the placement of media technologies. The article makes use of material media theory, posthumanism and actor-network theory (ANT), and is based on a case study, which uses observations, existing documents and semi-structured interviews as methods for data collection. Qualitative analysis of content is used to analyze the materials. The study concludes that the process of designing a physical library can be characterized as an actor-network and that media technologies affect library design both directly and indirectly. Choices made regarding placement of media technologies point to an implicit acknowledgement of the performativity of media technologies.

In the digitalization continuum of art and artefacts, the questions how and through which mediations artistic material ought to be presented are vital ones. This debate is here discussed with two such initiatives, namely the pan-Nordic museum portal DigitaltMuseum and the avant-garde repository UbuWeb. The initiatives are explained in an information scientific context, followed by a discussion of the repositories’ knowledge organization and user perspectives. Technological as well as juridical issues are thereafter brought up in order to illuminate the presentational differences between DigitaltMuseum and UbuWeb respectively. The arts council-funded DigitaltMuseum is viewed as a publication tool for Norwegian and Swedish museums to bring out various artefacts into the public web-sphere. UbuWeb is in turn defined as a rhizomatic guerilla-initiative for ensuring the digital prolonging for avant-garde material. The two repositories are in different ways concluded as significant platforms for the web-based display of digitized artistic objects and concepts.

Emanating in a Swedish and British context, this article discusses four contemporary tendencies in the two countries’ open access networks. An analysis of research funders’ policy documents is done through actor-networktheory. The study finds that while Swedish council Vetenskapsrådet is defined as a ”spider in the web” of the research funder network, the British network is more fragmentary. As for Bioscientific networks, the Swedish network is of a more peripheral sort while the British consists of sprawling nodes. Within Health Science, both countries have ties to infrastructures for data deposition. Deposition of monographs are central in networks regarding Social Science and the Humanities. It is proposed that funders, libraries and other professionals active within the open access movements considers these tendencies in the forming of activities and mandates. It is also emphasized that further studies are needed to map open access-networks. 

Viewing science as a human practice, partly dependent on the developments in scholarly publishing, what is considered scientific may depend on a plethora of factors besides the implementation of scientific methods – that is; historical, cultural, social, and economic realities. The present study investigates how the distinction between science and pseudoscience is mediated on Wikipedia through the sources used to substantiate this distinction. One of the most visited places on the web, Wikipedia is increasingly considered trustworthy, although relatively little is known about its sources. 469 references tied to 114 Wikipedia articles were investigated bibliometrically. Publication types, disciplines, science branches, primary publishers, owning institutions and institution types were identified, and the interconnections between these studied. Two word frequency analyses were conducted; one on the key sentences tied to the demarcation of science from pseudoscience in the Wikipedia articles, and one on the abstracts of the scholarly articles referred to there.

Som en del av mina studier i musei- och kulturarvsvetenskap sökte jag under vårterminen en distanskurs på halvfart vid konstvetenskapliga institutionen vid Uppsala universitet. Jag har sedan tidigare en kandidatexamen i konstvetenskap, varför just konstmuseernas framväxt och hur konstvetenskapliga föremål samlats in och ställts ut intresserar mig särskilt. Kursen Konst, kontext och uppvisningskultur i renässansens och barockens Italien syftar till att ge en fördjupad kunskap om just den italienska renässansens och barockens visuella kultur. Under kursens gång har vi, med utgångspunkt i litteratur, seminarium och två exkursioner, diskuterat konstmuseernas framväxt och konstmarknadens skiftningar i Italien och Sverige från 1300-talet till 1800-talet. Vi har närmare studerat några specifika samlingar, såsom Martelli- samlingen som idag fnns på Nationalmuseum i Stockholm och några av de furstliga samlingar som fnns vid de olika palatsen i Rom. Vi har även diskuterat vilken roll konst och skulptur spelat som maktsymboler och som ett sätt att sprida ideal, propaganda och skapa inflytande över den tilltänkte betraktaren.

Förutom en två dagar lång exkursion i Stockholm och Uppsala, då vi bland annat besökte Gustav III:s antikmuseum och Uppsala konstmuseum, gjorde vi en längre exkursion till Rom. Exkursionen bestod av fyra dagars undervisning ute i fält tillsammans med konstvetaren Johan Eriksson och idéhistorikern Per Widén. I samband med detta tillbringade jag även två dagar åt självstudier vid Svenska institutet, där jag även bodde under vistelsen. Under dagarna i Rom besökte vi tillsammans de kapitolinska museerna, Palazzo Barberini, Galleria Borghese, Galleria Spada, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Galleria Colonna och flera kyrkor.

Som student i musei- och kulturarvsvetenskap fann jag det intressant att studera hur föremål och byggnader haft olika, och parallella, betydelser genom århundradena och hur de visas upp idag. Det har även varit intressant att studera hur kulturarvet i Sverige och Italien påverkats och influerats av varandra. 

From November 2017, the mystical anonymous poster ”Q” filled its followers with messages regarding American politics. Q posted on different image boards and as the number of followers grew different web pages were created where canonical Q-posts (usually called ”drops” or Q-drops”) were preserved, numbered, tagged, and interlinked. The QAnons – the movement formed around the messages from Q – were fierce online discussants occupying almost every possible social media platform. The questions are – Will this corpus exist for future researchers? How do we preserve the content of a deplatformed movement? What are the limits of digital preservation of interlinked content created by a community?

Museums operate under ever-changing conditions. Nowadays, museums are much more than merely heritage institutions. Museums of today offer activities such as dining, shopping and cultural events. Yet, more research needs to be done to further understand the dynamics of the museum shops and restaurants. This article, based on a Master’s thesis, discusses the relations between the museum and its shops and restaurants. Based on empirical data gathered from three museums in Sweden through interviews and document analysis, the article also introduces a new set of concepts and models to describe the connection between the different facilities of a modern museum. These concepts are “profiles and ideals” that can be used to investigate how an establishment manifests itself physically based on certain desired ideals, “the product staircase” that evaluates the connection between the exhibitions and the products in the shop, and the “triple factor model” that describes how a museum restaurant can be managed in tandem with the museum.

This article is a summary of the doctoral thesis “Lärarstudenters digitala studievardag: informationslitteracitet vid en förskollärarutbildning”, defended and published at Lund University in February 2019. The thesis is published as part of the series Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences and is available through open access.

This article is a summary of the doctoral thesis “Lärarstudenters digitala studievardag: informationslitteracitet vid en förskollärarutbildning”, defended and published at Lund University in February 2019. The thesis is published as part of the series Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences and is available through open access.

På institutionen för ABM i Uppsala har en försöksverksamhet med olika former av nätbaserad undervisning bedrivits. På både campus- och distansutbildning har vi med fokus på ett mer kommunikativt lärande prövat nya sätt att genomföra seminariediskussioner, övningar och examinationsuppgifter. Våra erfarenheter är överlag positiva och undervisningen präglas nu i högre grad än tidigare av tvåvägskommunikation. En viktig lärdom vi dragit är att inte låta oss styras av tekniken allt för mycket. Avgörande för valet av seminarieform och kommunikationsmedel måste vara det pedagogiska syftet med undervisningen.

This paper focuses on a marketing campaign involving American football player Colin Kaepernick by Nike on social media platform Twitter. The paper explores how Nike uses progressive values to woke-wash their online marketing campaigns and investigates users’ responses to it. The empirical basis of the paper consists of two tweets, one by Nike and one by Kaepernick, as well as Twitter users’ replies (ranging from hundreds to thousands of replies) to the posts. The replies were categorized according to the most prominently and frequently expressed sentiments. A grounded theory approach was used then in order to apply relevant theoretical perspectives such as postfeminist sensibility and the floating signifier to the reply types and original posts, through which the source material was split into analytical themes. Ultimately, this study revealed an individualization of political expression on social media, both when a corporation like Nike uses it to improve its brand image and in how individuals engage with political and social issues, and that progressive causes are exploited to improve brand image and sell products.

Författaren deltog under tre dagar i juni 2018 i konferensen MuseumNext i London. MuseumNext är en internationell konferens som riktar in sig på museums pågående och framtida utveckling. Reseberättelsen innehåller även skildringar av besök på British Museum, The Photographers Gallery och The National Gallery. 

This travelogue tells about a trip to Oxford and the Oxford Summer School in the Digital Humanities 2022, 11 – 15 July. It summarises the course from three thematic perspectives; data structures, 2,5-dimensional digitizing of cultural heritage objects and combination of data analysis with AI for a methodology of how to compensate for absent information in archives.

For my master’s thesis in information science; “They don't know that we know they know we know”: A philosophical approach to complex information behaviors and digital limits, I received a research scholarship from the ALM department at Uppsala University. The scholarship enabled me to visit and interview librarians at the famous Picture Collection, New York Public Library. This unique and browsable research collection of images was founded in 1915 and holds over 12,000 subject headings. The semi-structured interviews with the librarians highlight their personal experiences of user behavior. The value of physical browsing is underlined through the strong criticism that arose from users when the library wanted to archive the unique collection.

This article illustrates how computers were perceived as capable to answer the acute problems with the handling of information within the Swedish health care during the 1960s. Advocates of computers in healthcare equaled healthcare problems with information problems; the latter could only be solved with the help of computers. Computers were also thought of as a novel aid allowing physicians to create useful knowledge, and ideas about medical knowledge were articulated as a response to the introduction of the new technology. The medical competences and knowledge had to be explained so that the computer would be able to process it – it was necessary to transform patient histories into binary language. By historicizing the role of computers within healthcare, the article shows how tools used to process information are adaptable to the demands of their context of use, and how they contrariwise also affect their context.

Sedan 1996 hålls årligen en konferens i Jyväskylä, museologins centrum i Finland, anordnad av och för museologistudenter. I år var arrangemanget lite speciellt eftersom studenterna i samarbete med ICOM Finland (International Council ofMuseums) arrangerade en konferens på temat ”Museietik 2.0”(Museoetiikka 2.0). Jag reflekterar här kring några av de teman som togs upp på konferensen. Först diskuterar jag utställningsetik och behovet av nya etiska regler som möter museers roll som samhällsutvecklare. Därefter frågar jag vem som får delta i skapandet och förmedlandet avkulturarv. Slutligen tar jag upp tillgänglighetsaspekten i konservatorns arbete och hur den kan komma i konflikt med autenticitetsideal. Detta är alltså bara en bit av det breda spektrum av idéer om museietik som presenterades under två dagar i Jyväskylä. Det som konferensen gav mig, och som jag här skulle vilja förmedla vidare, är bilden av ett mångfasetterat museiväsende i förändring som är i behov av uppdaterade etiska regler.

Spel och spelande är arenor för socialt samspel, lärande, förströelse och reflektion - de är en del av vår kultur. På senare år har tunga aktörer tillsammans uttryckt behov av statliga satsningar för att gynna svensk spelutveckling och spelforskning. Samtidigt har bevarandeperspektivet saknats i diskussionen. Här förklarar vi varför bevarande är viktigt, varför nationella och internationella bevarandesatsningar bör samordnas, och varför vi menar att spel och spelkultur bör bevaras tillsammans.

This article is an English summary of the doctoral thesis “Folkbildning för delaktighet. En studie om bibliotekets demokratiska uppdrag i en digital samtid”. The thesis was defended and published at Lund university in June 2019.

In the choice of file formats for preservation of text documents, there is a potential trade-off between preserving the integrity and usability of documents. This trade-off is first discussed in relation to four well established formats: plain text, PDF/A, Office Open XML Document and Open Document Text. These formats are then compared with Markdown, a relatively new so-called lightweight markup language. It is concluded that no single format is optimal with respect to the trade-off problem, when it comes to preserving typical documents in a modern environment, with more or less complex formatting and document structure. Therefore, the feasiblity of using two or more formats for preservation of a single document (e.g. PDF/A combined with Markdown and/or Office OpenXML) is discussed. It is necessary to weigh the importance of integrity and long-term usability against the costs of preserving documents in multiple formats.

Denna text baseras på en uppsats inom ABM-programmets inriktning musei- och kulturarvsvetenskap som publicerades juni 2018. Uppsatsen Motstridiga motprestationer: En studie om museers finansiella möjligheter och utmaningar undersökte hur finansieringen av 21 museer/museimyndigheter i Stockholm såg ut och belyste de ekonomiska utmaningar som finns.

This article describes a study about a specific form of sample preservation in Swedish municipality archives, a study that did not yield the expected results. Appraisal decisions and archival descriptions were collected and analysed in order to find out whether files related to social support had been preserved in accordance with regulations. However, it turned out that the biggest problem was not to find out whether the records in question had been preserved or not, but to locate files from different periods. The difficulties were caused by a long series of reorganisations of the municipality and exacerbated by a minimalist application of the principle of provenance. As a conclusion, process-based archival description combined with a maximalist application of the principle of provenance is recommended for complex organisations such as a municipality.

Föreliggande artikel består av sammanfattningen av avhandlingen Documenting Videogame Communities: A Study of Community Production of Information in Social-Media Environments and its Implications for Videogame Preservation, försvarad och publicerad vid Uppsala universitet i mars 2018. Avhandlingens kappa finns fritt tillgänglig i DiVA (http://www.diva-portal.org).

The method used in this study is triangulation and the source material has been retrieved by analysing discussion forums, performing interviews, as well as DNA-testing. The theories used in the analyses are based on Saar’s three dimensions of genealogy along with Case and Givens’ understanding of information behaviour. The results have enabled us to conclude three different future scenarios: 1) The commercial DNA-services will become the primary source of information for genealogists 2) the research material generated by genealogists will be seen as valuable by the archival institutions 3) the archival institutions will begin to facilitate information regarding genetic ancestry testing.

Hösten 2019 beviljades jag medel från Institutionen för ABM för att åka på en studieresa till England och insamla material till min masteruppsats. I uppsatsen undersökte jag och min kurskamrat Anna Westerlund hur barnbibliotekarier i England och Sverige ser på barns delaktighet och läsning. Därför åkte jag till England för att djupintervjua barnbibliotekarier. Vår förhoppning var att upptäcka likheter och skillnader mellan bibliotekariernas barnsyn. Jag besökte ett antal bibliotek och två berömda bokhandlar. Utöver de bibliotek jag redovisar här under var jag också på andra bibliotek för att insamla material till uppsatsen. För att trygga mina informanters anonymitet är dessa besök inte redovisade här. Tyvärr fick jag avbryta resan i förtid och ta ett flyg hem på grund av den eskalerande situationen med Covid 19. Jag vill ändå verkligen tacka institutionen för ABM för resan. Samtalen med bibliotekarierna var givande, trots omständigheterna.

Hösten 2018 beviljades jag medel av Institutionen för ABM för att åka på en studieresa till Samernas bibliotek (SB) i Jokkmokk. Detta bibliotek drivs av Sametinget. Där besökte jag även Àjtte Fjäll- och Samemuseum och Jokkmokks folkbibliotek. Syftet med resan var att lära mig mer om det samiska bibliotekets situation i samhället och se ett exempel på hur ett specialbibliotek styrs.