Past Projects
Table of contents:
The project is a collaboration between Uppsala University, Upplandsmuseet and the Institute for Languages and Folklore. Research will focus on the cultural heritage site of Ekeby, combining archaeology and the history of society, buildings, and place-names, with the site's many time layers as a common hub. The aim is to create the conditions for well-founded narratives of the place, its farms, crofts, agriculture and indwellers from prehistory through the Middle Ages and to the present. The history of the hamlet's uniquely preserved 19th C setting, and earlier eras, will be mediated through a digital 3D visualization of Ekeby's 18th C appearance, information signs,
web & prints.
Contact: Rosemarie Fiebranz
East Norse (Old Swedish and Old Danish) literature is a mine of information on how foreign lands were visualised in the Middle Ages: What places were written about and where? Are some places more popular in certain text types or at certain times? How do place names link different texts? Is there a shared concept of spatiality? How is space gendered?
Geohumanities, the spatialisation of literary studies, and cognitive mapping are growing fields within digital humanities, but the study of spatial thinking and knowledge in medieval Scandinavia and its development as an area of enquiry are hampered by a dearth of information on place names in literary texts. Any research aiming to uncover what pre-modern Scandinavians understood about places abroad requires as a minimum an index of foreign place names in East Norse literature. Yet to-date no such index exists.
Contact: Alexandra Petrulevich
More about The Norse Perception
The research platform Everlasting Runes will present Sweden’s runic inscriptions in a new way and give new possibilities to work with runic material. The aim is to show, in one and the same place on the Internet, all the country’s runic inscriptions in text and image, and simultaneously to provide a large and varied collection of documentation and original sources for further research. The research platform will link the published parts of the series Sveriges runinskrifter with the Scandinavian Runic-text Database and make it possible to use both these sources together. In connection with the project three research tasks will also be carried out, using the material and contributing to the design of the platform: “Runic inscriptions of Medelpad”, “The islands in the Baltic Sea”, and “Otto von Friesen as a runologist”. Everlasting Runes is a collaboration between the National Heritage Board and Uppsala University. The name is a translation of the Old Norse word ǣvinrūnaʀ, which is attested twice in the sources: once carved in stone on the Malt Stone in Jutland and once written on parchment in the Eddic poem Rígsþula.
Contact: Marco Bianchi
More about Everlasting Runes
Contact: Marco Bianchi
More about the project Digitala Birgitta
Contact: Carin Östman
More about Svensk dramadialog under tre sekler
FROM DUST TO DAWN: MULTILINGUAL GRAMMAR EXTRACTION FROM GRAMMARS PROJECT
Traditionally, researchers often study the diversity of world's languages by reading and comparing grammatical descriptions manually. Nowadays, a large amount of linguistic descriptions and books are easily available in digital formats. Reading them all for a wider-level comparison and analysis is way beyond individual people's capabilities. Text technology, i.e. computer-based text management in natural language, is now powerful enough to potentially be used to harvest facts at different levels of detail within a given domain (in this case, information on world languages). In this project we want to utilize a useful collection of 9000 digitized grammatical descriptions covering over a thousand languages in order to significantly expand the ability to make major language comparisons. For this purpose, the project will develop methodologies to enable computers to read grammatical descriptions and automatically extract information ("linguistic facts"). We are to explore and develop a notion of "language profile", which is a structured digital collection and representation of a language encapsulating all available knowledge about a language extracted from various sources.
Contact: Harald Hammarström
Contact: Johan Svedjedal
More about Från närläsning till fjärrläsning
This cross disciplinary initiative takes its point of departure in the analysis of handwritten text manuscripts using computational methods from image analysis and linguistics. It sets out to develop a manuscript analysis technology providing automatic tools for large-scale transcription, linguistic analysis, digital paleography and generic data mining of historical manuscripts. Our mission is to develop technology that will push the digital horizon back in time, by enabling digital analysis of handwritten historical materials for both researchers and the public.
Contact: Anders Brun, Anders Hast
More about From Quill to Bytes (q2b)
Young people today receive news mainly in digital media. In the channels where also destructive movements try to spread fear and prejudice with fake news. To deal with the social challenges of fake news and fact resistance, we have developed the digital tool News Evaluator.
The tool supports young people's reviews of news feeds and is also a user-friendly database where reviewed news can be explored by young people themselves. Design and content are based on current research on young people's difficulties in reviewing news online and the importance of their own active processing of their news feeds. The tool creates a dynamic interface between education and research, and stimulates students to actively engage where they can compare their own evaluations with other students' reviews. The current information on credible and fake news in young people's media streams gathered in the tool can be used in teaching, research and journalism. In the first step of the project, 6,000 young people tested the tool and before the 2018 elections, 3,500 young people.
In the next step we will:
- refine the design of the tool and database
- supplement the tool with a self-test in digital source criticism
- evidence-test the possibilities and limitations of the tool
- explore opportunities to give the public access to the tool
- further develop the tool for national and international dissemination.
Contact: Thomas Nygren
More about The News Evaluator
Establishing a Database of Turkic Runiform Inscriptions is one of the major tasks of a recently initiated interdisciplinary research network at Uppsala University. The research network includes philologists, linguists and archaeologists, and aims to document, describe and analyse the runestone inscriptions of Eurasia.
Contact: László Károly
More about the project
The project develops a more complete understanding of ancient Near Eastern inscribed objects commissioned by private individuals using cuneiform writing between ca 2800 BCE–100 CE. The objects were set up for the sake of remembrance, most commonly in cultic contexts. In the early Near Eastern urbanities, people sought to establish a presence before gods to ensure divine favour. The combined strengths of material objects and inscriptions lent permanence to the symbolic act of gift-giving, establishing lasting ties between humans and the divine. The aim is to identify and highlight the personal perspective in inscribed objects commissioned by private individuals and the relationship- and value-creating potential that come to the fore in such objects. Objects are approached by means of a materiality profiling, combining analyses concerning, e.g., archaeological context, content and finish of the text, along with physical characteristics and production techniques.
Contact: Jakob Andersson
More about Memories for Life
Eastern European Karaims are the sole representatives of Karaite Judaism in Europe. Their native tongue is a severely endangered Turkic vernacular listed on the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Due to many historical events, including World War II and the Soviet era, the cultural heritage of this intriguing ethnic minority suffered great losses.
The project will construct a digital edition of the entire Karaim Bible, based almost exclusively on unedited texts in Hebrew script (15th–20th cc). It will contain the first ever comprehensive Karaim translation of the Hebrew Bible intelligible to present-day native speakers. As a complex scientific instrument, it will deliver the first linguistic and palaeographic descriptions of the oldest, still unedited records of Karaim as well as reconstruct the way in which the Karaim Bible was created.
Combining traditional and computer-aided research methods will provide essential data on the early history of the Karaim language and ethnicity.
Michał Németh at Jagellonian University is the principal investigator of the project. László Károly as partner at Uppsala University will be responsible for creating an on-line platform including a dynamic digital edition of Karaim Bible translations interconnected with a lexicographic database.
In the long run, the platform at UU will be capable of providing digital editions, a corpus based lexicographic database, and other related software components to support the scholarly study of other Middle Turkic literary languages as well.
Contact: Michał Németh, László Károly
More about (Re)constructing a Bible
Within the framework of Clarin, we are developing a Swedish diachronic corpus, containing texts from Old Swedish (13th century) to Contemporary Swedish. Our primary goal is to create a resource to be used for research in historical linguistics, for studies on how the Swedish language has changed over time, but the corpus can also be an important resource for other researchers in the humanities. We aim for a balanced corpus, with texts from different genres and time periods. Furthermore, the corpus should have a structure similar to diachronic corpora available for other languages, in order to enable comparative studies both within the Swedish language and between Swedish and other languages. In addition, we will add linguistic annotation to the texts in the corpus, enabling more sophisticated search queries. We also find it very important to take input from the intended users into account in the corpus building process, and we have therefore at an early stage sent out a survey to researchers in historical linguistics, in order to learn more about their needs and views on the contents and structure of the upcoming Swedish diachronic corpus.
Contact: Eva Pettersson