Gaming as an activity possesses many different facets (Sköld 2018: 134). One important yet relatively underexplored is the social facet, how the act of gaming is impacted by social rules and codes. Previous research on the topic is relatively limited and mainly performed retroactively on older game communities. The thesis addresses this lack of research by studying a community formed around World of Warcraft, a game that currently has an active player base.  By specifically studying a World of Warcraft guild whose members define the guild by its social nature (Interview 1,2,3,4), this thesis provides a perspective on how the desire to maintain relationships impact how gaming is practiced and what is considered to be desirable behaviour among players.  The thesis is based on material gathered in four interviews and two observations of guild members playing together. The interviews were primarily focused on discovering how the members experienced the guild and the game itself, and what they believed to be positive or negative behaviour. The observations were intended to study how the members interact in practice, how the ideas and notions that they mentioned in the interviews were expressed while playing. The analysis uses Political Discourse Theory (PDT) to connect the ideas, practices and terms used in both interviews and observations into a cohesive discourse. This discourse is then divided into specific traits that are seen desirable within different contexts.  The thesis finds that being respectful of other guild members time is seen as the most important trait among players. This respect is primarily expressed through understanding that other members have lives outside of the game and therefore cannot devote the majority of their time to the game. If another player or even the game itself demands more from a member than they are able to give, it is seen as problematic. Accomplishing in-game goals is seen as fun, yet unimportant in comparison to maintaining a respectful social environment within the guild.

This thesis examines the roles played by digital information and communication technologies in a Swedish public library’s three-year long renovation project. As a case study of technology-influenced collaboration in a cultural heritage institution, this study addresses a gap in digital humanities research on the practical details of sociotechnical collaboration, as well as a lack of documentation of an ongoing trend of renovations and rebuildings of Swedish public libraries.  A large number of internal materials produced at the library during the course of its renovations was studied, and semi-structured qualitative interviews with three of the cultural heritage workers involved were conducted. Reading these materials with an actor-network theory approach, an account was constructed of the renovation project and the usages therein of digital technologies, in order to examine these technologies as actors and their effects on the project. It was found that, throughout the project, information and communication technologies were used to think, plan, organize, discuss, and make decisions about the work, that limitations and affordances of these technologies shaped how they could be used, and that this thus had effects on the project. Digital technologies are shown to have been active and agential, and avenues for future research are suggested.

This thesis shall utilise digital humanities methods via modest data-collection tools to quantify and study the online discussion involving Russia and Ukraine online. The research shall apply sentiment analysis to Twitter data to understand the general divisiveness online relating to the war in Ukraine. In doing so, a foundation is formed to begin extrapolating theories on the extent to which disinformation and synthetic media shall mutate this already sensitive situation. Secondly, this thesis shall parse data from groups on the Russian website VK using groups which circulate blatantly dishonest content and disinformation, ultimately revealing how engagement and posting trends on these communities have developed over the timeline of this conflict. The research will also draw from two external studies to contrast the findings. Finally, beyond discussing past and present examples of disinformation, this thesis shall conclude by theorising the trajectory AI will take to alter this evolving dynamic. This troublesome theory is conceivable through mediums like deepfakes and predominantly concerns their scalability, which could shortly become mass-produced items as their creation becomes increasingly more accessible. This shall be attempted by quantifying the total number of tweets produced globally during the period the deepfake of president Zelensky circulated. Despite being in its infancy, this thesis shall ultimately argue that artificial media shall become more ubiquitous as catalysts of disinformation.

Cultural data can come in various forms and modalities, such as text traditions, artworks, music, crafted objects, or even as intangible heritage such as biographies of people, performing arts, cultural customs and rites. The assignment of metadata to such cultural heritage objects is an important task that people working in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) do on a daily basis. These rich metadata collections are used to categorize, structure, and study collections, but can also be used to apply computational methods. Such computational methods are in the focus of Computational and Digital Humanities projects and research. For the longest time, the digital humanities community has focused on textual corpora, including text mining, and other natural language processing techniques. Although some disciplines of the humanities, such as art history and archaeology have a long history of using visualizations. In recent years, the digital humanities community has started to shift the focus to include other modalities, such as audio-visual data. In turn, methods in machine learning and computer vision have been proposed for the specificities of such corpora. Over the last decade, the visualization community has engaged in several collaborations with the digital humanities, often with a focus on exploratory or comparative analysis of the data at hand. This includes both methods and systems that support classical Close Reading of the material and Distant Reading methods that give an overview of larger collections, as well as methods in between, such as Meso Reading. Furthermore, a wider application of machine learning methods can be observed on cultural heritage collections. But they are rarely applied together with visualizations to allow for further perspectives on the collections in a visual analytics or human-in-the-loop setting. Visual analytics can help in the decision-making process by guiding domain experts through the collection of interest. However, state-of-the-art supervised machine learning methods are often not applicable to the collection of interest due to missing ground truth. One form of ground truth are class labels, e.g., of entities depicted in an image collection, assigned to the individual images. Labeling all objects in a collection is an arduous task when performed manually, because cultural heritage collections contain a wide variety of different objects with plenty of details. A problem that arises with these collections curated in different institutions is that not always a specific standard is followed, so the vocabulary used can drift apart from another, making it difficult to combine the data from these institutions for large-scale analysis. This thesis presents a series of projects that combine machine learning methods with interactive visualizations for the exploratory analysis and labeling of cultural data. First, we define cultural data with regard to heritage and contemporary data, then we look at the state-of-the-art of existing visualization, computer vision, and visual analytics methods and projects focusing on cultural data collections. After this, we present the problems addressed in this thesis and their solutions, starting with a series of visualizations to explore different facets of rap lyrics and rap artists with a focus on text reuse. Next, we engage in a more complex case of text reuse, the collation of medieval vernacular text editions. For this, a human-in-the-loop process is presented that applies word embeddings and interactive visualizations to perform textual alignments on under-resourced languages supported by labeling of the relations between lines and the relations between words. We then switch the focus from textual data to another modality of cultural data by presenting a Virtual Museum that combines interactive visualizations and computer vision in order to explore a collection of artworks. With the lessons learned from the previous projects, we engage in the labeling and analysis of medieval illuminated manuscripts and so combine some of the machine learning methods and visualizations that were used for textual data with computer vision methods. Finally, we give reflections on the interdisciplinary projects and the lessons learned, before we discuss existing challenges when working with cultural heritage data from the computer science perspective to outline potential research directions for machine learning and visual analytics of cultural heritage data.

The emergence of digital humanities has provided humanities scholars with digital methods and tools to deal with digital materials and new possibilities for humanities research. What is more, digital humanities skills and experience help humanities students with their research and strengthen their employment prospects. Therefore, humanities researchers and students are also actively acquiring digital humanities skills from different sources. For academic libraries, providing teaching and research support to users is one of the strategies to achieve their research and educational goals. Scholars reviewed the discussion about how libraries could support digital humanities and found that information literacy, as an important component of academic libraries, is rarely mentioned in the supporting services for digital humanities. In this context, studies began to explore the library’s role and opportunities to support digital humanities from the information literacy perspective.  This study chose to focus on this mode of conducting digital humanities education through the information literacy curriculum, which aims to provide a reference for whether academic libraries can implement this mode and how to achieve better teaching and learning outcomes from empirical analysis. Uppsala University Library acts as the case in this study because teaching information literacy is one of its primary teaching tasks, and providing digital humanities support is also one of the library’s strategies to achieve its service and support goals. From librarians’ instructional design for the information literacy curriculum and their perceptions of digital humanities and its relationship to information literacy, this thesis tries to find what support Uppsala University Library’s information literacy curriculum can provide for conducting digital humanities education. In addition to this, the thesis also aims to identify the existing advantages and barriers if Uppsala University Library conducts digital humanities education in the IL curriculum and develop suggestions on how to promote teaching outcomes.  The findings suggest that Uppsala University Library’s information literacy curriculum could provide support to conduct digital humanities education in terms of teaching content that involves digital humanities knowledge, teaching activities that are conducive to active learning and librarians with positive attitudes towards digital humanities. Uppsala University Library has advantages when it conducts digital humanities education through the information literacy curriculum in terms of infrastructure, digital humanities knowledge in information literacy teaching content, active teaching activities, librarians’ literacy capabilities, and librarians’ positive attitudes towards digital humanities. It is also worth noticing that Uppsala University Library also faces barriers to the design of teaching cycles and activities as well as librarians are less expert in digital humanities concepts, skills, and pedagogical design.  For Uppsala University Library, whether to conduct digital humanities education in the information literacy class in the future requires serious consideration of all aspects that affect its teaching, such as funding and administration. And this study aims to provide a reference for Uppsala University Library to choose the way of digital humanities education in the future.

Translation alignment is an essential task in Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing, and it aims to link words/phrases in the source text with their translation equivalents in the translation. In addition to its importance in teaching and learning historical languages, translation alignment builds bridges between ancient and modern languages through which various linguistics annotations can be transferred. This thesis focuses on word-level translation alignment applied to historical languages in general and Ancient Greek and Latin in particular. As the title indicates, the thesis addresses four interdisciplinary aspects of translation alignment. The starting point was developing Ugarit, an interactive annotation tool to perform manual alignment aiming to gather training data to train an automatic alignment model. This effort resulted in more than 190k accurate translation pairs that I used for supervised training later. Ugarit has been used by many researchers and scholars also in the classroom at several institutions for teaching and learning ancient languages, which resulted in a large, diverse crowd-sourced aligned parallel corpus allowing us to conduct experiments and qualitative analysis to detect recurring patterns in annotators’ alignment practice and the generated translation pairs. Further, I employed the recent advances in NLP and language modeling to develop an automatic alignment model for historical low-resourced languages, experimenting with various training objectives and proposing a training strategy for historical languages that combines supervised and unsupervised training with mono- and multilingual texts. Then, I integrated this alignment model into other development workflows to project cross-lingual annotations and induce bilingual dictionaries from parallel corpora. Evaluation is essential to assess the quality of any model. To ensure employing the best practice, I reviewed the current evaluation procedure, defined its limitations, and proposed two new evaluation metrics. Moreover, I introduced a visual analytics framework to explore and inspect alignment gold standard datasets and support quantitative and qualitative evaluation of translation alignment models. Besides, I designed and implemented visual analytics tools and reading environments for parallel texts and proposed various visualization approaches to support different alignment-related tasks employing the latest advances in information visualization and best practice. Overall, this thesis presents a comprehensive study that includes manual and automatic alignment techniques, evaluation methods and visual analytics tools that aim to advance the field of translation alignment for historical languages.

Introduction. This thesis investigates the digitisation of Indigenous collections at the Museum of World Culture (Gothenburg, Sweden), with particular attention to Carlotta’s role in shaping the digital collections. Previous studies have shown that there is a need for more research on the practical aspects of digitisation efforts on Indigenous cultural heritage in Sweden. Method. The museum’s documentation—digitisation strategies, annual reports and other official documents—was explored. In addition, several interviews and participant observations were conducted. Qualitative content analysis was used to evaluate the empirical data Analysis. The qualitative analyses of this study’s empirical data used postcritical and postcolonial museological theories. Additionally, Bhabha´s Third Space theory was applied Results. The results show that the digitisation of collections at the museum according to the organisation´s plans, applying the recommended guidelines and considering the ethical implications that arise when working with Indigenous material has not been achieved. Moreover, the results show that Carlotta is not a suitable collections management system for Indigenous cultural heritage. Conclusion. This study concludes that the Museum of World Culture needs to adapt the goals of its digitisation processes to the type of collections and resources they have and incorporate a decolonisation computing approach. In addition, there is a need for official regulations or guidelines addressed to those working with Indigenous collections in Swedish libraries, archives and museums. / <p>The thesis was funded by the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet samfond 2023).</p>

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The evolution of social media platforms and other public forums in the digital realm has created an explosion of user-generated content and data as a component of the already content-saturated digital landscape. The distributed, horizontal nature of the internet as a platform makes it difficult to ascertain value and differentiate between texts of varying validity, bias, and purpose. In addition, the internet is not an inanimate interface. As Pariser (2011) argues, content aggregators, such as Google, actively filter, personalize, and therefore limit each individual's access to information, in both range and type. This has created a crisis of information valuation and control. Importantly, conventional curriculum does not furnish students with the information literacy tools necessary for them to navigate the digital landscape effectively. Information miners and developers, including news organizations, are falling victim to this fallacy as well. Lankshear and Knobel (2011) posit that empowering navigation and control in the digital landscape requires a new mindset. This research offers a context-driven approach that acknowledges this new mindset, promoting "rhetorical consciousness" (Murphy et al., 2003) within the network and providing a framework to recognize, challenge, and co-create gatekeeping roles and mechanism as they increasingly shift to the individual.

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