Projects

Below you can see the titles of some of our pilot projects. Read more about pilot projects here.

Unmapping Africa: Enlightenment Geography and the Making of Blank Spaces

PI: Petter Hellström

Market concepts in Scandinavian political debate: contribution to the history of neoliberalism in the Nordics

PI: Elin Åström Rudberg

Identifying novel and important inventions in historical patent documents with techniques from natural language processing

PI: Matti La Mela

Computational reading of open-ended eHealth survey data (CROEHDA)

PI: Isto Huvila

Dionysus Recomposed

PI: Eric Cullhed

Extending the SWERIK application

PI: Måns Magnusson

Machine extraction for The predictive value of psychological testing for labor market outcomes among job seekers

PI: Constanze Eib

Excavating text – text mining of Swedish excavation reports from the NHB e-archive

PI: Daniel Löwenborg

Distant reading: exploring linguistic style in 19th century British fiction via the HUM19UK corpus

PI: Daniel McIntyre

A regional scale predictive model of domestication in southern Mozambique

PI: Décio José Dias Muianga

Russian Digital Nationalism: Nationalist Media Ecology in Times of War and the Discursive Construction of Russian National Identity

PI: Alexandra Brankova

Image Recognition beyond the Early Herbarium

PI: Anna Svensson

Building an Automated Procedure for Extraction and Collection of Published Historical Wealth Inequality Estimates

PI: Jakob Molinder

Digitized deeds: a pilot study exploring methods for extracting

PI: Johan Ericsson

Utilizing AI for Analyzing Large-Scale Assessment of Students’ Democratic Knowledge

PI: Thomas Nygren

Here you will find some of the projects that our research engineers are currently working on.

Artificial Intelligence as the Risk and Opportunity for the Authenticity of Archives

This project is a collaboration between Uppsala and Linnaeus University. The project will investigate how artificial intelligence can future-proof our cultural heritage, for curation of archival materials as well as providing better search and access to them. More info.

Contact persons: Anna Foka, Isto Huvila, Larissa von Bychelberg.

Capturing Paradata for Documenting Data Creation and Use for the Research of the Future (CAPTURE)

The empirical focus of CAPTURE is archaeological and cultural heritage data, which stands out by its extreme heterogeneity and rapid accumulation due to the scale of ongoing development-led archaeological fieldwork. Within and beyond this specific context, CAPTURE develops an in-depth understanding of how paradata is being created and used today, elicits methods for capturing paradata, tests new methods in field trials, and synthesises the findings in a reference model to inform the capturing of paradata and enabling data-intensive research using heterogeneous research data stemming from diverse origins. Read more about the project here. Contact: Isto Huvila.

URDAR: A Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Excavation Data

The Urdar project will ensure that digitally born documentation from excavations will not be lost to posterity and that it will be findable for researchers through linked data and open archives. Semantic linking of field documentation and research data will enable information to be optimized for Digital Humanities and the sciences. This will contribute to interdisciplinary research as well as strengthen the position of archaeology in academic research. The project is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and is a collaboration between Uppsala University, the Swedish National Heritage Board, Umeå University and Lund University. Find out more about the project here.

Contact: Daniel Löwenborg.

Quantifying Culture: AI and Heritage Collections (WASP-HS 2021-2025)

Read more about the project here.

Acting Out Disease. How Patient Organizations Shaped Modern Medicine (ActDisease)

ActDisease works across disciplines and methods to capture the long and broad history of patient organizations in Europe. It combines studies in historical archives and close reading of texts with computer-based analysis of sources. More information available on the project website.

Time and People in Pausanias’s Greece

The project, financed by the Swedish Research council (2023-2026) will create a digital edition of Pausanias’s ten volumes of the Description of Greece, the touristic guide of the 2nd century CE enriched with entities which, though critical for the analysis of cultural geography, have been relatively neglected in spatial/digital humanities: namely, data about time and people. The project will develop methods and tools for identifying and investigating in Pausanias’s Description: (a) time as both a relative and absolute concept, including time formats (periodization vs. numerical time etc.); and (b) people, including social categories for the study of ethnicity and gender. Contact: Anna Foka.

Marginalia

This project exploits the exceptional early book collections found in both Uppsala and Durham Libraries, such as Bishop Cosin’s library and Carolina Rediviva. Marginalia written in these books by their successive owners are an important source of evidence for European intellectual history, but access to these annotations is very difficult. Catalogues sometimes register the presence of marginalia, but rarely its content. Being able to search that material would instantly create an important new tool for research. Contact: Anna Foka.

A Digital Periegesis (2018-2022)

In this project, funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation we trace, map and analyse Pausanias’s spatial (re)imagining of Greece: both his representation of the (human) geography of Greece and the spatial structure, or place-boundedness, of his text. Read more on the project website.

Gender and Work (GAW)

Gender and Work (GaW) is a combined research and digitisation project hosted by the Department of History at Uppsala University, since 2008. The aim of the project is to increase knowledge about the work of both men and women in the past (1550-1880). More about Gender and Work.

Automatic Decryption of Historical Manuscript

Thousands of encrypted manuscripts are found in archives all over Europe, documents that are not yet available for historical research. Many scholars and scientists are working on some of these documents in a completely uncoordinated fashion, and from different and complementary areas such as history, linguistics, philology, computer science, and computational linguistics, all with their own point of view, purpose and methods. The aim of this project is to bring the expertise of these different disciplines together, to digitize and process the historical encrypted sources and release these through a database with information about provenance and other facts of relevance. We focus on the development of software tools for automatic or semi-automatic analysis and decryption of various types of encrypted documents, by employing linguistic universals and formal methods.

Patterns of Popularity: Towards a Holistic Understanding of Contemporary Bestselling Fiction

The purpose of this project is to make a holistic analysis of contemporary bestsellers by combining different methods (distant and close, inductive and deductive, probabilistic and historic-empiric), materials (text data, metadata, reader data), and theoretical perspectives (publishing studies, computational criticism, media theory).

Chronos - Chronology of Roots and Nodes of Family Trees: Fine-Tuning the Instruments of Linguistic Dating

The project aims to explore the possibilities of dating ancestral stages of language families by a systematic and careful study of the stability and replacement patterns of different types of linguistic data.

Swedish Caribbean colonialism 1784–1878. Integrating, classifying, publishing and investigating dispersed Swedish colonial archives

Sweden became a slave nation when the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy was taken into possession in 1785. The island was sold to France in 1878 and the entire Swedish government archive was left on the island. This Swedish archive, the Fonds Suédois de Saint Barthélemy contains c. 300.000 manuscript pages –­– and is in the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence. It is closed to both researchers and the public. The project is based on the successful digitization of this archive (2011–2016) and makes this the largest Swedish colonial archive available via the Internet together with other collections of Swedish Caribbean documents in the Swedish National Archives and foreign collections.

Cultural Evolution of Texts

How is cultural knowledge passed down through generations? Which processes promotes the fidelity of transmission of written or oral texts over longer or shorter times? And are there regularities in the processes of change that they undergo? This project takes a mixed methods approach to analyse how religious and instructional texts are passed down through time. The research project brings together researchers with expertise in different types of text traditions with researchers working within computer science and phylogenetic frameworks. This unique collaboration is expected to contribute to the development of new methods for phylogenetic network analysis of linguistic and cultural evolution.

Geomapping landscapes of writing (GLOW): large-scale spatial analysis of the cuneiform corpus (c. 3400 BCE to 100 CE)

Cuneiform is one of the oldest scripts in human history and among the largest bodies of historical documentation from the ancient world.Written primarily on clay, cuneiform texts are preserved in larger numbers than virtually any other type of written media. This project assembles and analyses a full digital record of this corpus drawing on recent advances in digital humanities and geospatial data mapping. As a first quantifiable and corpus-wide study of one of the greatest corpora of historical records from the ancient world, it will provide a benchmark example of the application of digital and spatial computing tools to the study of writing in early human history.

GIS for Language Study

The Gift Project

Museums serve as our collective memory, preserving and interpreting our shared culture and identity. The central challenge of the GIFT project is to create designs that facilitate meaningful interpersonal experiences. GIFT focusses on hybrid experiences, realised through mixed reality designs that overlay physical visits with digital content as a way to complement, challenge or reframe the experience of museum visits.

SWEGRAM

SWEGRAM aims to provide a tool for text analysis in Swedish and English. You can upload one or several texts and annotate them at different linguistic levels with morphological and syntactic information. The annotated texts can then be used to extract statistics about the text properties with respect to text length, number of words, readability measures, part-of-speech, and much more.

Around the Village Ring Street: Interdisciplinary Research and Historical Visualisation, The Cultural Heritage Site of Ekeby Village

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 person: Rosemarie Fiebranz.

The Norse Perception of the World: A Mapping and Analysis of Foreign Place Names in Medieval Swedish and Danish Texts

The project is building a digital infrastructure to facilitate interdisciplinary research on medieval worldviews as recorded in East Norse texts. East Norse (Old Swedish and Old Danish) literature is a mine of information on how foreign lands were visualised in the Middle Ages. 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. As a result of the project, the Norse World resource has been developed. Contact person: Alexandra Petrulevich.

Everlasting Runes: A Research Platform for Sweden's Runic Inscriptions

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. Read more about the project. Contact person: Marco Bianchi.

Digitala Birgitta: Att Tillgängliggöra Heliga Birgittas Fornsvenska Texter/Bridget of Sweden Digitally. Making St Birgitta’s Revelations in Old Swedish Accessible

The project is part of an overall effort devoted to editing and publishing all of St. Birgitta’s writings in Old Swedish and make them available in digital form. Find out more here. Contact person: Marco Bianchi.

Svensk Dramadialog Under Tre Sekler/Swedish Drama Dialogue Over Three Centuries

Contact person: Carin Östman.

From Dust to Dawn: Multilingual Grammar Extraction from Grammars Project

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 person: Harald Hammarström.

Från Närläsning till Fjärrläsning/From Close Reading to Distant Reading (??)

The research project lays the foundation for infrastructure for computer-aided text analysis of Swedish texts. Computer-aided text analysis is a relatively new field of research that gives researchers great opportunities to analyse large volumes of text in order to find semantic, linguistic and thematic patterns. More info available here. Contact person: Johan Svedjedal.
From Quill to Bytes (Q2B)

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. More information here. Contact: Anders Brun, Anders Hast.

The News Evaluator

To deal with the social challenges of fake news and fact resistance, this project has 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. Contact person: Thomas Nygren.

A Database of Turkic Runiform Inscriptions

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. Find out more here. Contact person: László Károly.

Memories for Life: Materiality and Memory of Ancient Near Eastern Inscribed Private Objects

The project develops a more complete understanding of ancient Near Eastern inscribed objects commissioned by private individuals using cuneiform writing between c. 2800 BCE–100 CE. The aim is to identify and highlight the personal perspective in inscribed objects ordered on behalf of private individuals as well as the relational and value-creating potential that emerges from such objects. Read more about the project here. Contact person: Jakob Andersson.

(Re)constructing a Bible: A New Approach to Unedited Biblical Manuscripts as Sources for the Early History of the Karaim Language

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. Contact: Michał Németh, László Károly.

Swedish Diachronic Corpus

The purpose of the project is to provide a corpus of texts that extends from Old Swedish to the present day, and that contains a variety of text types, freely available for download and search by both researchers and the interested public. Read more about the project. Contact person: Eva Pettersson.