Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

Sometime in the second century CE, Pausanias of Magnesia (modern-day Turkey) wrote the Description of Greece. Ostensibly a tour of the places to see on the Greek mainland, the Description also provides historical accounts related to the topography through which Pausanias moves. Little attention has been given to how these building blocks of narrative, the entities of place and time, relate to and intersect with each other. In this article, we establish a framework for systematically investigating Pausanias’s chronotopes through a process of semantic annotation. We describe our typology for categorizing place and time, with the aim of enabling this text’s database of information — the descriptions of the built environment, its temples, statues, etc. — to be mapped and analysed. Our emphasis, however, is on how the technology equally facilitates close reading, as we trace how individual locations, objects and people relate to each other through the unfolding of chronotopes, and examine how in turn these chronotopes transform our understanding of the spaces of Greece and Greece as a place. We conclude by offering reflections on the potential for semantic annotation of the kind documented here not only for conducting chronotopic investigations of literary geographies, but also for bringing the textualization of space into direct dialogue with the material culture on the ground.

 When video games have historical settings, what is known of the past and how this is interpreted with eyes of the present time shapes our gameplay experience. As the past is always reinterpreted and reshaped -- informed by contemporary concerns -- playing historical games becomes a two-way dialogue between history and the now. In this study we explore this dialogue through the lens of Ubisoft’s (2018) Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (ACO), focusing on the doing of gender and sexuality as constructs which vary through place and time. Through close playing, we examine how gender comes to be ergodically through playing with gender by combining the scholarly perspectives of game studies and ancient history.

We argue that the position of modern video game players, with their contemporary values and experiences of doing gender, combine with ‘player choice’ as a core value in modern game development to impact what kinds of historical reconstructions are available for game developers. Our main case study, ACO, avoids making players perform gender practices of the past that clash with modern values. This concerns the characterisation of the female protagonist, representation of other women in the game and representations of sexuality through the game's narrative, aesthetics and game mechanics. Finally, we argue that games like the Assassin's Creedseries are leveraging history to tell exciting stories. Yet, the gendered story ACO tells could have been made considerably more interesting by drawing on the ways that gender has been done in history, rather than, as is now, erasing the historical power positions women have inhabited.

The classics have in many ways pioneered the application of digital methods to narrative spatial analysis and developed strong collaborative engagement with infrastructure, producing Pelagios, an ever-growing platform for a plethora of spatial databases and gazetteers, as well as Recogito a digital annotation tool. These two successful examples show a pressing need for community building around SRIs for early modern and medieval Scandinavia to ensure sustainable design, long-term preservation, and further collaborative development. This article discusses this development in the context of the digital periegesis project and the resources used for Pausanias's description of Greece 

This chapter provides a critical examination of the promise of AI technology with a focus on museums and cultural heritage organisations. We argue that while AI shows great potential for digitalisation, collections management and curation, its implementation is a complex endeavour. First, we discuss artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies with great potential such as computer vision and natural language processing, as well as the implementation of AI for heritage encounters. We then identify a number of challenges in implementing these technologies—namely using technology to address the diversity of human memory and culture that is inherent in cultural heritage collections, but also issues of accessibility and technical know-how. Finally, we envision the future potential of AI for the digitalisation of heritage.

Our article AI, cultural heritage, and bias examines the challenges and potential solutions for using machine learning to interpret and classify human memory and cultural heritage artifacts. We argue that bias is inherent in cultural heritage collections (CHCs) and their digital versions and that AI pipelines may amplify this bias. We hypothesise that effective AI methods require vast, well-annotated datasets with structured metadata, which CHCs often lack due to diverse digitisation practices and limited interconnectivity. This paper discusses the definition of bias in CHCs and other datasets, exploring how it stems from training data and insufficient humanities expertise in generative platforms. We conclude that scholarship, guidelines, and policies on AI and CHCs should address bias as both inherent and augmented by AI technologies. We recommend implementing bias mitigation techniques throughout the process, from collection to curation, to support meaningful curation, embrace diversity, and cater to future heritage audiences.

The chapter deals with the creation of a digital humanities centre at Uppsala university and touches upon public reading practices but also new machine learning technologies such as gpt4. 

This article examines the challenges and opportunities that arise with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods and tools when implemented within cultural heritage institutions (CHIs), focusing on three selected Swedish case studies. The article centres on the perspectives of the CHI professionals who deliver that implementation. Its purpose is to elucidate how CHI professionals respond to the opportunities and challenges AI/ML provides. The three Swedish CHIs discussed here represent different organizational frameworks and have different types of collections, while sharing, to some extent, a similar position in terms of the use of AI/ML tools and methodologies. The overarching question of this article is what is the state of knowledge about AI/ML among Swedish CHI professionals, and what are the related issues? To answer this question, we draw on (1) semi-structured interviews with CHI professionals, (2) individual CHI website information, and (3) CHI-internal digitization protocols and digitalization strategies, to provide a nuanced analysis of both professional and organisational processes concerning the implementation of AI/ML methods and tools. Our study indicates that AI/ML implementation is in many ways at the very early stages of implementation in Swedish CHIs. The CHI professionals are affected in their AI/ML engagement by four key issues that emerged in the interviews: their institutional and professional knowledge regarding AI/ML; the specificities of their collections and associated digitization and digitalization issues; issues around personnel; and issues around AI/ML resources. The article suggests that a national CHI strategy for AI/ML might be helpful as would be knowledge-, expertise-, and potentially personnel- and resource-sharing to move beyond the constraints that the CHIs face in implementing AI/ML.

This paper presents the Swedish National Doctoral School in Digital Humanities: Data, Culture, and Society – Critical Perspectives (DASH) that is run in 2023–2027 by Uppsala University, Umeå University, Linnaeus University, and Gothenburg University. Though Swedish universities have established PhD courses, MA programmes and training in digital humanities previously, DASH is the first encompassing educational programme in digital humanities at the doctoral level. The present paper discusses the rationale behind the DASH doctoral school, its role in the landscape of Swedish humanities infrastructures, and provides insights from the first PhD courses and seminars. The focus of DASH is to equip PhD candidates in humanities and social sciences with knowledge and skills necessary to pursue high quality, innovative and critical research in digital humanities. DASH aims to provide knowledge in relation to digital research, its methods, tools, and critical perspectives, and to build and strengthen the networks among early career scholars. DASH facilitates access and use of the resources in the national infrastructures in the humanities, but also emerges as an element in the infrastructure by providing new resources and competences.

Taking into consideration that archaeologists and historians are today more frequently encouraged to think in terms of digital transduction of historical materials, this chapter focuses on the potentials and pitfalls of ‘visualizing’ ‘recre- ating’ and ‘re-enacting/experiencing the senses’ in Virtual Reality (thereon VR) environments. More precisely, we focus on the very idea of sensory immersion for archaeological enquiry, research, study and dissemination. This chapter draws upon four VR projects at Humlab, Umeå University. The first is an example of using archae- ological data for supporting the interpretation process in a Mesolithic site, environ- ment from GIS to an immersive platform. The second is a result of collaborative work with the project ancient dance modern dancers (Slaney et al. 2018) in capturing the intangible art of Roman Pantomime in the theatre of Pompeii on Virtual Reality. The third is the implementation of interactive tools for an immersive study of photogram- metric models of medieval rock-cut settlements while the fourth is an assessment of the implementation of VR Google Earth in teaching ancient topography for under- graduate archaeology students. We show how important and interesting research is made in the process of tool experimentation and tool development.

Word Rain is a development of the classic word cloud. It addresses some of the limitations of word clouds, in particular the lack of a semantically motivated positioning of the words, and the use of font size as a sole indicator of word prominence. Word Rain uses the semantic information encoded in a distributional semantics-based language model – reduced into one dimension – to position the words along the x-axis. Thereby, the horizontal positioning of the words reflects semantic similarity. Font size is still used to signal word prominence, but this signal is supplemented with a bar chart, as well as with the position of the words on the y-axis. We exemplify the use of Word Rain by three concrete visualization tasks, applied on different real-world texts and document collections on climate change. In these case studies, word2vec models, reduced to one dimension with t-SNE, are used to encode semantic similarity, and TF-IDF is used for measuring word prominence. We evaluate the technique further by carrying out domain expert reviews.

This work aims to study the construction of migrant categories and immigration discourse on Swedish-speaking Facebook pages in the last decade. It combines the insights from computational linguistics and distributional semantics approach with those from discursive psychology to explore a corpus of more than 1 M Facebook posts. This allows one to compare the meanings of labels denoting various categories of migrants and identify the key interpretative repertoires used to discuss the immigration topic. The study finds that the ‘immigrant’ category has stronger association with potential costs, benefits and threat to the host society, while the ‘refugee’ category is presented as in need of support and solidarity. Nevertheless, objectification and exclusionary rhetoric are used in relation to both categories, although in different ways, while the immigration issue is often interpreted as a matter of Sweden’s national concern rather than as a part of people’s actual experiences and life paths.