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AbstractThousands of Roma were killed in Ukraine by the Nazis and auxiliary police on the spot. There are more than 50,000 Roma in today’s Ukraine, represented by second and third generation decendants of the genocide survivors. The discussion on Roma identity cannot be isolated from the memory of the genocide, which makes the struggle over the past a reflexive landmark that mobilizes the Roma movement. About twenty Roma genocide memorials have been erected in Ukraine during last decade, and in 2016 the national memorial of the Roma genocide was opened in Babi Yar. However, scholars do not have a clear picture of memory narratives and memory practices of the Roma genocide in Ukraine. A comprehensive analysis of the contemporary situation is not possible without an examination of the history and memory of the Roma genocide before 1991.

Recently rediscovered photographs of the remains of thirteen individuals buried in the Sado Valley Mesolithic shell middens of Poças de S. Bento and Arapouco, excavated in 1960 and 1962, show the potential of revisiting excavation archives with new methods. The analysis, which applies the principles of archaeothanatology and is enriched by experimental taphonomic research, confirmed details concerning the treatment of the dead body and provided new insights into the use of burial spaces. Some bodies may have been mummified prior to burial, a phenomenon possibly linked to their curation and transport, highlighting the significance of both the body and the burial place in Mesolithic south-western Portugal.

This essay aims to understand and analyse earlier research concerning women’s roles in the Late Iron Age through a gender perspective. This will be done by analysing the Volva theory in relation to ancient medicine in Scandinavia with the primary focus on the medicinal herb henbane. The volva theory and the interpretation of grave 4 at the fortification of Fyrkat as a “Volva grave” had an immense impact on contemporary scientific research and popular science. The essay will examine the volva grave, at Fyrkat in Jylland, Denmark because it’s unique finding of henbane seeds. For comparison the essay will look at other archeological contexts containing henbane. The Oseberg grave will also be included in this essay because of its relevance for the volva interpretation and gender discourse in earlier research.

By examining the donations by the local nobility to the local church, this thesis aims to study the church as a public room. By analyzing the donations of the nobility in relation to Habermas concept of the public sphere and the concept of conspicuous consumption the donations to the churches can be viewed as manifestations of power. This thesis studies all donations to the churches that leaves material and visual remnants in the church room. The results shows that there was a conscious strategy for the nobility to use the church for manifestation and representation of power. The nobility used their donations to manifest their power and to represent the power towards the people. This was done by filling the church with their names and coats of arms. By donating liturgical objects, church silver, chapels and coats of arms used for funerals the nobility was able to symbolically place themselves in the religious rituals. The church as a room was a symbolically and hierarchical place, and by connecting themselves with this room by donations the nobility could manifest their position in society, both locally and nationally. 

Uppgifter för behandling av naturliga språk (NLP) har under de senaste åren visat sig vara särskilt effektiva när man använder förtränade språkmodeller som BERT. Det enorma kravet på datorresurser som krävs för att träna sådana modeller gör det dock svårt att använda dem i verkligheten. För att lösa detta problem har komprimeringsmetoder utvecklats. I det här projektet studeras, genomförs och testas några av dessa metoder för komprimering av neurala nätverk för textbearbetning. I vårt fall var den mest effektiva metoden Knowledge Distillation, som består i att överföra kunskap från ett stort neuralt nätverk, som kallas läraren, till ett litet neuralt nätverk, som kallas eleven. Det finns flera varianter av detta tillvägagångssätt, som skiljer sig åt i komplexitet. Vi kommer att titta på två av dem i det här projektet. Den första gör det möjligt att överföra kunskap mellan ett neuralt nätverk och en mindre dubbelriktad LSTM, genom att endast använda resultatet från den större modellen. Och en andra, mer komplex metod som uppmuntrar elevmodellen att också lära sig av lärarmodellens mellanliggande lager för att utvinna kunskap. Det slutliga målet med detta projekt är att ge företagets datavetare färdiga komprimeringsmetoder för framtida projekt som kräver användning av djupa neurala nätverk för NLP. Natural language processing (NLP) tasks have proven to be particularly effective when using pre-trained language models such as BERT. However, the enormous demand on computational resources required to train such models makes their use in the real world difficult. To overcome this problem, compression methods have emerged in recent years. In this project, some of these neural network compression approaches for text processing are studied, implemented and tested. In our case, the most efficient method was Knowledge Distillation, which consists in transmitting knowledge from a large neural network, called teacher, to a small neural network, called student. There are several variants of this approach, which differ in their complexity. We will see two of them in this project, the first one which allows a knowledge transfer between any neural network and another smaller bidirectional LSTM, using only the output of the larger model. And a second, more complex approach that encourages the student model to also learn from the intermediate layers of the teacher model for incremental knowledge extraction. The ultimate goal of this project is to provide the company’s data scientists with ready-to-use compression methods for their future projects requiring the use of deep neural networks for NLP. 

Iron ore mining in the Norrbotten region of Sweden began in the early years of the twentieth century as a commercially uncertain and even dangerous proposition. But even before it began to generate profits, public debate began over the appropriate role of the state and of private capital (including foreign investors). This included whether iron ore should be exported for profit or retained for future processing in Sweden—even though the technology and infrastructure for such domestic industry did not exist. Tracing the evolution of this debate in the Swedish news media through to the First World War, this paper argues that the revenue generated by exports became more attractive than the promise of future domestic industry because that revenue could underwrite pressing political objectives. Although domestic iron ore processing remained linked to visions of future industrial prosperity, uncertain visions of future prosperity lost appeal as the capacity for export revenues to generate prosperity in the present became more potent.

School in the shadow: Private education in Stockholm 1735. During the early eighteenth century, private education was a more significant sector of the educational market than was public education, regarding the number of students and teachers, the presence of female students and teachers, the social background of the students, and the introduction of a more diverse and modern curriculum. Hitherto, little has been known of the actual scope or general conditions of private education, which has been over-shadowed by studies of public education. The article maps private education through the Stockholm Church Consistory’s (Stockholms stads konsistorium) thorough inventory of private teachers in the capital of Sweden during 1734–36, providing information of both suppliers and consumers within the private sector of the educational market, as well as of the practice and functions of private education in early modern time.

The large-scale transatlantic mobility of students, teachers, and researchers is a twentieth-century phenomenon that has contributed to the reshaping of international cultural, economic, and political relations into the twenty-first century. Through and as part of this development, the United States transformed into a powerful and influential country on the global stage. As a large, populous, and industrialized nation, the United States has been significant both as a funder of international mobility and as a destination for foreign students and scholars. Sweden, a small, peripheral country in Northern Europe, has had a long relationship with the United States. Amidst the mass migration of peoples from several European countries to North America in the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, over one million Swedes migrated to the United States. The connections made through this migration, combined with the growing economic, industrial, and cultural resources of the United States, led to a renewed desire to maintain and improve relations between the two countries from the early twentieth century. This study investigates the development of scholarship programs in Sweden and the United States and their role in the academic exchange between these two countries from 1912–1980. Set against broader cultural, economic, and political processes that increased the scale and complexity of academic mobility in the twentieth century, this study explains how scholarships facilitated and structured flows of people and knowledge. The relationships between three parts of scholarship programs are analyzed: their purposes, organizational frameworks and praxis, and scholarship awards. The analysis employs three points of departure: rationales for internationalization, historical institutionalism, and symbolic capital. Annual reports and scholarship holder documentation are the two main types of sources. Annual reports were used to create a historical timeline of the purposes that drove the founding of organizations and the establishment of scholarship programs to understand the institution of scholarship-funded academic mobility in the twentieth century. Scholarship holder documentation was used to create two datasets of scholarship awards from 1912–1944 and 1945–1979, which were analyzed using descriptive statistics to find patterns and trends in scholarship awards. The results show that the scholarship programs in this study structured complex and asymmetrical flows of people and knowledge between Sweden and the United States in the twentieth century. In the first period, private foundations were the main providers of scholarships and were steered by an array of cultural, academic, and economic purposes. After World War II, and especially during the Cold War, scholarship programs were submitted to the politicization and regulation of the United States government as transatlantic academic mobility became an increasingly widespread practice. The combined and overlapping purposes that steered scholarship-awarding from 1912–1980 facilitated the rise of particular individuals, types of knowledge, higher education institutions, and industries in Sweden and the United States. In addition, the asymmetrical distribution of these scholarships, in which three times as many Swedes traveled to the United States than the reverse, gradually structured a dependence on the academic, economic, and technological resources of the United States.