This article builds on the current rethinking of nostalgia in heritage studies and an increasing amount of research that explores the formatting of customer – producer relationships in terms of ’market attachments’ to analyse how nostalgia is performative on the market for retro, vintage and second hand, what we call the re:heritage market. Based on a multi-sited study including offline and online ethnographic observations, photography and qualitative interviews with shop owners and staff at a selection of central streets in Gothenburg, Sweden, the article explores the way shop owners work with nostalgia in order to attract, or ‘captate’, the public, through engaging affective market devices. Our particular contribution is to show how the re:heritage market contribute to our understanding of an alternative of cultural heritage, through configuring exchange and value, and details how ‘affective captation’ adds conceptual strength for understanding the emotive and sensate pull of certain market-based heritage practices. Staging nostalgic encounters involves practices of selecting, collecting, displaying and preserving for the future: practices that are vital for all heritage-making. A variety of actors are involved in this unconventional of heritage at safe a distance from traditional heritage practices.

In early 2007 there was an art exhibition in Stockholm by Swedish artist Kajsa Dahlberg,1entitled A Room of One’s Own/A Thousand Libraries.2The exhibition included a printed edition of a quite peculiar book the artist had composed. The book and the exhibition triggered some thoughts about book studies and the role of the reader, about bibliography and textual studies, and about marginalia and other kinds of reader interaction in books. But let us begin from the beginning — here is the background of the exhibition and the book.

Scholarly editing based on textual criticism means examining a bulk of documents and their texts, clustering these around the abstract notion of a work, arranging them in a web of relations and trying to represent this web in the scholarly edition, a surrogate purporting to represent the work. The way the edition positions the documents to the work, and itself as mediator between them, is affected by such factors as ideology, epistemology, aim and function, tradition, and supporting and distributing media. Scholarly editions are to some extent hermeneutical documents and subjective interpretations, in two senses: they carry with them a history of ideology and a hermeneutical heritage, and they also exert an interpretative influence over the objects they are designed to manage. Nevertheless editions have a strong tradition of conveying a sense of value-free objectivity, a mere recording of (matters of) fact. Charles Bazerman has observed that ”... to write science is commonly thought not to write at all, just simply to record the natural facts." This is a scientific legacy within scholarly editing as well. Further, the transmission that both scholarly editors and e.g. digitizers at libraries are engaged in when transferring a perceived content (such as 'text') from one document to another, can be differently recognized by the 'transmittors' as media models, i.e. as either: 1/ context-free content delivery, or 2/ interpretative and tool-dependent content manipulation, or 3/ a process that is defined by a context-dependent and content-circulating ecosystem of media. As a consequence, scholarly editing is historically a field where conflicting ideals battle: on the one hand, the ideal that the edition (bordering on 'archive') should strive for total exhaustiveness, uniformity, perfect mimetics and universal tools; on the other, that editions should recognize and be valued for their authority to select and deselect, explain and interpret, define and constitute. This paper will looks at some of these models and ideals that might seem to be in conflict, and specifically discusses to what extent they are prolonged or even boosted (= tradition), or perhaps changed or even annihilated (= innovation) within the realm of digital scholarly editing. And if the two fields of scholarly editing and library activities (such as digitization and metadata scheme production) are increasingly brough closer to one another, how does that development fit with the aforementioned models and ideals?

If publicly funded libraries (PFL) such as national libraries were to adopt a more open source approach when making digitized cultural heritage (CH) material available, users would be granted not only open access to delivery files at a surface level (in e.g. PDF, JPG, or XHTML) but ”deep access” to archival file material and technical documentation as well (such as TIFF, full XML/TEI, scripts, style sheets and machine instructions). PFL:s would thereby strengthen the force behind the values of equal access, of supporting education and research, and of distributing not only digitized material but competence and methods as well. They might also come one step closer to sharing information-rich material with other digitizing institutions by constructing valid banks of commonly and mutually accessible digitized CH material. As of yet however, this is far from the case. Many PFL:s are rather adopting a policy to restrict public access to light-weight delivery versions while charging users for access to the archival, deep level (or hiding it away altogether). This paper examines some of the arguments for such a restrictive policy and discusses feasible ways of bypassing some of the open source obstacles.

Libraries and other memory institutions have throughout history developed a range of methods and tools for transmitting full texts between material carriers and across media family borders. In this sense, library digitization belongs to the same tradition as 20th century microfilming and the ancient transcribing of manuscripts. The Gutenberg era marked a sharp decline in this full text transmitting business, and libraries devoted their time to producing bibliographical knowledge organization (KO) labels for documents rather than reproducing the full documents themselves. With digital reproduction technologies however, libraries have drawn a historic circle. They are yet again dedicating much energy and attention to the full text transmission they largely abandoned at the dawn of the printed age. In so doing, they take on a much more explicit role of producing and shaping the digital cultural heritage (CH) in addition to its accustomed role of preserving it and making it available. In this paper, we will discuss the practices of digitization within the library institutional setting, and in particular, the national library setting

We address the multilingual and semantic upgrades of two digital catalogues of motifs and types in folk-literature: the Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (TMI) and the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system (ATU). The methods convert, translate, and represent their digitized content in terms of various (so far often implicit) structural and linguistic components. The results will enable (i) utilizing these resources for semi-automatic analysis and indexing of texts of relevant genres, in a multilingual setting, and (ii) pre-processing the data, for analysing motif sequences in folktale plots. We plan to publish the resulting data, which can be made available in the Linked Open Data (LOD) framework.

Flax is a traditional plant used to make textiles. Flax, like all natural fibres, is a material with variations. Knowledge of a crafting process can be obtained by studying artefacts and all available documentation and by being present in a craft tradition and society of spinning. A craftsperson will make many small decisions during their work. How do we gain knowledge about handling materials, and how do we preserve the intangible skills relevant to a craft? This performance article aims to make visible specific knowledge of material, tools and working methods for re-hackling flax. The text and performance illustrate the perspective of a reflecting craftsperson. By asking questions about the work process, critical decisions regarding crafts will be highlighted. This approach will help preserve and transmit craft skills within flax processing.

The Life of a Dress is a travelling exhibition and series of workshops. In the light of the global trade of second-hand clothing the project aims to investigate how value-adding activities in participatory handicraft workshops in local communities may engage a population from different generations and nationalities in an exercise in reappropriating these materials. It is a further aim of the project to observe and induce aspects of developing, influencing and reconstructing sustainable patterns of consumption and production. The project explores models for fashion remanufacturing and creates opportunities for further development. The exhibition features collaborations with celebrated photographers and presents a world of dresses and artworks that have been produced or found along the way. In its centre, an open workshop developing shared ideas and skills from its participants takes place.

The Life of a Dress explores possible ways to use, improve and reconfigure the current system of fashion through reclaiming what the system itself is creating and wasting. The concept of sustainable design is explored as an approach which is here defined as being sensitive to the local and global context. The exhibition and workshop has since 2009 visited different continents and countries to share its content and learn from local projects and people about ways of how to rethink the use of materials. It is exploring how second-hand dresses found in local markets and streets may be used as assets for further transformation. Craft workshops and prototyping labs are created around the collected materials and people are invited to join in. During these workshops participants are encouraged to challenge current structures and ways of thinking around materials and making. The BIG MAMA, a mini-dress similar to an oversized t-shirt is one example of a product which is made in most of the workshops. It is a catalyst element normally brought in to the making process to see how the participants interact with the given materials and each other and how this may vary between different countries. The exhibitions are normally built up around the map dress which rests like a symbol for the global nature of textiles, clothing and fashion. Imagination is used and regarded as the main renewable resource in and outside this project. Creativity and its various forms of expressions is further explored and used to drive to project forward.

Urban Cultures: Fallet Kommersen (Case Kommersen) This project builds upon knowledge derived from our previous work with Urban Cultures (se Gillberg et al 2012), which was a summary of both theoretical (cultural) perspectives on the city as well as cultural everyday doings within the city. Our conclusion then, which is our point of departure now, was that urban cultures needed the city to be an enabling city. This time we want to further explore this topic by investigating the city in real life. Our intention is modest and based on the humble thought of a possibility to add some positive insights from adding culture – as a methodological and analytic perspective, a concept and an empirical given – into the mix of ingredients commonly associated with the notion of sustainability. One way of reaching the sustainable city is thought to be by making the city dense. Therefore one of the aims of this project is to investigate what the concept cultural densification would consist of and what it would mean to use it within city planning. To do so we have chosen the flea market Kommersen at Masthuggstorget, Gothenburg as our case study. We argue that markets, and in this case an urban flea market, are important phenomena that contribute to sustainable urban cultures in specific ways depending on particular market mechanisms, organizational features and socio-cultural dimensions of the flea market. In conclusions we present the concept of sustainable cultural densification defined as: urban cultures are drivers of complex processes of layering of values over time. These values could be seen as solutions to different problems residing in cities, and a lens through which to perceive of sustainable urbanity.

In this article, we present the analysis of a state-of-the-art review made as part of the Horizon 2020 EU-funded project AMASS (Acting on the Margins: Arts as SocialSculpture), which aims to address challenges of marginalisation in Europe through arts-based interventions. This study analyses researched-based materials on the social impact of the arts, theoretically underpinned by an understanding of the role of the arts in conjunction with the problematisation of social marginalisation. We found three ways to understand the social impact of the arts in the material; as a participatory means to agency and empowerment, identity and expression, and learning and development. These categories are related to analytically derived positions of marginalisation as predominantly structural- or more individual-based. Art is conceived of as a way to bridge these positions through an understanding of its educational qualities. These categories offer a fruitful but also potentially limited role of the arts in society.

Rapporten summerar följeforskning av det första året av det läsfrämjande projektet "Stärkta bibliotek - Staden där vi läser för våra barn!" Projektet drivs av Kulturförvaltningen i Göteborg och fokuserar folkbibliotekens läsfrämjande arbete mot målgruppen barn och unga och deras familjer. Projektet är en del av Kulturrådets satsning "Stärkta bibliotek" som syftar till att stärka landets biblioteksverksamhet. Följeforskningen följde det läsfrämjande arbetet som genomfördes på tre arenor: på biblioteken, genom uppsökande verksamhet och digitalt. Särskilt uppmärksamhet har ägnats läsfrämjande praktiker och samverkan, fortbildning och utbildning samt praktiker kring bokgåvor. Även jämlikhetsfrågor var viktig för följeforskningen då projektet genomfördes inom ramen för Göteborgs verksamhetsövergripande satsning på mobiliseringen "Staden där vi läser för våra barn".

Metadata that serve as semantic markup, such as conceptual categories that describe the macrostructure of a plot in terms of actors and their mutual relationships, actions, and their ingredients annotated in folk narratives, are important additional resources of digital humanities research. Traditionally originating in structural analysis, in fairy tales they are called functions (Propp, 1968), whereas in myths – mythemes (Lévi-Strauss, 1955); a related, overarching type of content metadata is a folklore motif (Uther, 2004; Jason, 2000).In his influential study, Propp treated a corpus of tales in Afanas'ev's collection (Afanas'ev, 1945), establishing basic recurrent units of the plot ('functions'), such as Villainy, Liquidation of misfortune, Reward, or Test of Hero, and the combinations and sequences of elements employed to arrange them into moves.1 His aim was to describe the DNAlike structure of the magic tale sub-genre as a novel way to provide comparisons. As a start along the way to developing a story grammar, the Proppian model is relatively straightforward to formalize for computational semantic annotation, analysis, and generation of fairy tales. Our study describes an effort towards creating a comprehensive XML markup of fairy tales following Propp's functions, by an approach that integrates functional text annotation with grammatical markup in order to be used across text types, genres and languages. The Proppian fairy tale Markup Language (PftML) (Malec, 2001) is an annotation scheme that enables narrative function segmentation, based on hierarchically ordered textual content objects. We propose to extend PftML so that the scheme would additionally rely on linguistic information for the segmentation of texts into Proppian functions. Textual variation is an important phenomenon in folklore, it is thus beneficial to explicitly represent linguistic elements in computational resources that draw on this genre; current international initiatives also actively promote and aim to technically facilitate such integrated and standardized linguistic resources. We describe why and how explicit representation of grammatical phenomena in literary models can provide interdisciplinary benefits for the digital humanities research community. In two related fields of activities, we address the above as part of our ongoing activities in the CLARIN2 and AMICUS3 projects. CLARIN aims to contribute to humanities research by creating and recommending effective workflows using natural language processing tools and digital resources in scenarios where text-based research is conducted by humanities or social sciences scholars. AMICUS is interested in motif identification, in order to gain insight into higher-order correlations of functions and other content units in texts from the cultural heritage and scientific discourse domains. We expect significant synergies from their interaction with the PftML prototype.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the conceptions of aesthetic quality used in Swedish literature policy through a study of the discourse of the state support to new, Swedish fiction 1975-2009. This support scheme is a quality-based retrospective grant, introduced in 1975, aiming to guarantee the quality and versatility of book publishing. It is explored as an expression of cultural policy in a welfare policy setting, where the autonomy of the arts is a central concept. The quality of the book is the foremost criterion for the award of support and quality assessment is carried out by a work group consisting of authors, critics, librarians and researchers. The empirical part of the study analyses arguments concerning state support forwarded in the debate from political documents, articles in newspapers and trade press, debate books and also in six interviews with former members of the workgroups from the 1970s and the 2000s. A discourse policy analysis is used to examine the discourse of the support, how it is legitimized and the conceptions of aesthetic quality embedded in the discourse. The results show that for stakeholders state support is highly legitimate. The support is discursively connected to welfare politics and democracy, even though it is aimed at artifacts, not citizens. It is legitimized as being a support to book production, not for mediating literature. There has been a shift in the conception of quality, from being identified in a negative sense to a positive sense. A professional concept of quality as a driving force is used by the workgroup. The shift towards explicating quality can be seen as a way of protecting the concept of quality in a time where it is perceived as being under threat. The use of quality as the foremost criterion can be seen as resistance against shifts in cultural policy that are perceived as adaptations to market values or politicization. The results render visible the political aspects of the concept of quality in state support.

Culture is a central concept for the Nordic radical right parties, but little research has been done on the cultural policy of the parties. This article is a comparative overview of the party programs of four Nordic radical right parties during the latest decade. It relates the cultural policies of the radical right to the predominantly welfare-based corporatist cultural policy of the Nordic countries. Through a discursive policy analysis two problem representations are found: That multiculturalism is seen as a threat against national culture and that public funding is seen as a threat against freedom. The parties share a common understanding of cultural policy, with minor differences. There is an underlying conflict in the discourse: While the parties argue that the political governance of art needs to be limited, they are, at the same time, deeply involved in how cultural expressions and cultural life should be defined.

The aim of this chapter is to trace the conceptual history of diversity in Swedish cultural policy. Earlier research on diversity in cultural policy has mainly been devoted to ethnic understandings of the concept from 1995 and onwards. A longer perspective makes it possible to follow a cultural policy in transition. Cultural policy is conceptualised as a practice that reinforces certain values in a nation. The material consists of cultural policy documents published during the time period. Three overlapping understandings are found: diversity as variation (from 1972), ethnic diversity (from 1995) and an umbrella-concept (from 2007) including different social categories. The results reveal that the understanding of the concept has changed from being anti-commercialism to including private actors and 240 freedom of choice to achieve diversity. Another change has been a shift in focus from groups to individuals. Diversity may be seen as an outside goal, and a result of immigration policy and discrimination laws and not coming from inside the cultural field. However, it is mostly perceived as a positive concept, used to legitimate a cultural policy in liberal, heterogenic societies since the market cannot guarantee diversity by itself. A risk is that the concept will become too vague when it is used for many different aspects of cultural policy.

The European Union nominates cities as European Capitals of Culture in order to highlight the richness and diversity of European cultures and the features they share, as well as to promote greater mutual acquaintance between European citizens. For the chosen cities, the nomination creates a possibility to promote the cultural identity, originality and diversity of the region and city. The empirical focus of the article is on three cities which were chosen as European Capitals of Culture for 2010 (Pécs in Hungary), and 2011 (Tallinn in Estonia and Turku in Finland). The cities utilize various strategies in emphasizing and representing their cultural diversity. All of the cities stress their location as a historical meeting place of different ethnicities and nationalities. Additionally, the cities stress their architecture as an expression of multicultural layers of the cities. In the cities, cultural diversity is related to the global imagery of popular culture, street culture and contemporary art. In addition, the cities stress the canon of Western art history as a base for common Europeanness compounded of various nationalities and regionalities. One essential strategy is to represent different minorities and their visual culture as signs of cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is a complex and political concept. Its definitions and representations inevitably involve power structures and production of cultural and political hierarchies. Hierarchies and political tension are bound to the concept even though it is often introduced as equal and anti-racist discourse.

Purpose: This study aims to propose the four different typologies for understanding local information. Design/methodology/approach: This study applied a conceptual approach to analyze and clarify how the concept local information can be understood in wildly different ways. Furthermore, this study employed conceptual analysis of 36 studies. For the conceptual analysis, coding was applied to formulate and abstract four typologies for understanding local information with specific focus on the Thai cultural heritage setting. Findings: The four different typologies include local information as an array of different interpretations as diverse meanings of local, local information as cultural heritage, local information as subject of information management and situated local information. Research limitations/implications: This study mainly focuses relevant typologies for understanding local information in the Thai context. Originality/value: This study contributes and extends the literature in the local information field and the cultural heritage context. In addition, an eclectic strategy of using several alternative typologies for dealing with essentially contested concepts is suggested. This can be useful not only for supporting librarians working with local information but also in other practices dealing with broadly defined concepts. © 2021, Pussadee Nonthacumjane and Jan Michael Nolin.

Den nationella ungdomspolitiken betonar ungas delaktighet och att de ska ges reellt inflytande med möjlighet att kunna påverka samhällsutvecklingen. I Falköpings kommun har under de senaste åren bedrivits ett systematiskt arbete med denna inriktning. Mål 1 i kommunen är ”Ett socialt hållbart Falköping”. I kapitlet redovisas hur kommunen arbetar för att implementera sin policy i praktisk verksamhet med fokus på unga. Följeforskningen pekar på ett socialt innovativt arbete men också utmaningar för att främja alla ungas delaktighet och samhörighet.

This study explores and compares attitudes and feelings of middle-aged British and Swedish Internet non-users as well as their reasons for being offline. The rich qualitative data are conceptualized and presented according to various reasons for non-use, positive and negative feelings regarding non-use, and the positive as well as negative influence of and dependence on social networks. The comparison shows both unique and common perceptions of the British and Swedish respondents, some of which can be attributed to social, economic, or socio-economic factors. However, it also displays vast differences between middle-aged non-users in both countries. The analysis paints a complex picture of decisions for and against the use of the Internet and the need for more research to understand these highly complex phenomena, which cannot simply be attributed to socio-economic backgrounds as has been done in most previous research. The analysis shows that more complex reasons, such as lack of interest or discomfort with technologies, as well as the somewhat surprising finding that social networks can prevent non-users from learning how to use the Internet, as it is more convenient to stay a proxy-user, should be considered in future research and policies regarding digital inequalities.