Seminar: Pelle Snickars

Welfare State Analytics (WeStAc), a collaboration between Umeå University and the National Library of Sweden, is a digital humanities research project that will digitise literature, curate already digitised collections, and perform research via probabilistic methods and text mining models. WeStAc will both digitise and curate three massive textual datasets—in all, Big Data of almost four billion tokens—from the domains of Swedish politics, news media and literary culture during the second half of the 20th century. The dataset of “Politics” contains already digitised SOU-reports and material from the Swedish Parliament, “Media” contains two digitised Swedish newspapers, “Culture”—will be digitised—and contains a literary journal and all Swedish novels from 1945 to 1989. 

WeStAc will trace discursive changes on a scale hitherto unexplored by Swedish scholars. Considering the possibility to process large amounts of data through methods such as probabilistic topic models, NER or word embeddings, WeStAc will analyse how societal transformations can be empirically measured—for example by distant reading the notion of globalisation, or data modeling ideas of emancipation and individualisation.

Pelle Snickars is Professor of Media and Communication Studies, specialising in digital humanities at Umeå university, with an affiliation to the Humlab research centre. His research focuses the relationship between old and new media, media economy, digitisation of cultural heritage, media history as well as the importance of new technical infrastructures for the humanities.