• Publicationsclose
• Other research productsclose
• 2013-2022close
• Closed Access close
• DK close
• English close
• University of Southern Denmark Research Output close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

The use of visualization to underpin distant reading arguments on cultural heritage data has established in the digital humanities domain. Novel strategies to represent data visually typically arise from interdisciplinary projects involving humanities and visualization scholars. However, the quality of outcomes might be inhibited as typical challenges of interdisciplinary research arise, and, at the same time, problem solving strategies are missing. I taught a course on visual data analysis in the digital humanities to let students with diverse study backgrounds experience those challenges in their early academic careers. This paper illustrates the research-teaching components of my course. This includes the contents of the theoretical training with active learning tasks, aspects of the practical training and considerations for teachers aiming to compose a related course.

While digitizing data is the first major step for many digital humanities projects, the visual analysis is of high value for humanists, as it brings a wide range of possibilities to work with data. While rather traditional analysis often concentrates on standalone or sets of information (close reading), global inspections of linked data are also requested by today’s researchers and made possible through digital processing. Hence, distance reading approaches are more and more found in humanities projects. Next to such approaches allowing new research questions of quantitative analysis, linking previously separate information on a data level is another way of providing humanists with access to further, previously not reachable, global inspections of faceted datasets. As a domain with both, faceted data and a rather low level of digitization, musicology is a prime example of how the digital humanities may improve and support the daily workflows of humanists. Despite the generally low level of digitization, multiple projects already build a basis to help in digitizing the field. As an example, the musiXplora project collected a vast amount of musicological data throughout the last 16 years and now offers both, a detailed biography of persons, places, objects, events, media, institutions and terms and also the linkage between these kinds of entities to help in giving a user a comprehensible overview in the traditionally fragmented field of musicology. Supported by a set of visualizations, the website of the project allows for visual analysis on close reading and distant reading levels. This does not only help researchers in their daily workflows but also offers users with a more casual nature an interesting view inside the domain of musicology.

The article explores how the global Cold War conflict was made sense of and situated in local political, cultural and physical landscapes and communities during the 1980s in Britain and Denmark. Using civil defence as a prism, the article employs a comparative approach to explore variations within and between countries of how local authorities prepared or resisted the prospect of nuclear war. The article finds that two main imaginaries emerged that shaped shared understandings of society before, during and after the imagined future war: one emphasized the possibility of nuclear survival and even welfare, the other urged resistance and renounced the futility of civil defence preparations. The article argues that local actors used these imaginaries to empower themselves, to define how nuclear space was imagined and lived and to construct desirable (and undesirable) visions of the future. The imaginaries were multiscalar and interacted with developments at global and national levels, and the article sheds light on this three-way dynamic of understanding and articulating the nuclear age.

Abstract Using the case of the island Parish of Drejo, Denmark, this article examines historical crime on small islands and adds to our understanding of islands as criminological spaces. Building on an analysis of the typology of the crimes committed on the five small islands of Skaro, Drejo, Hjorto, Hjelmshoved and Birkholm primarily in the nineteenth century and a quantitative analysis of the number of children born out of wedlock in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the same islands, it is argued that the geography of the islands in question intensified social control and affected their criminological profile. The article concludes that placing social control in the center of island life links research on island crime and ideas of island utopias.

Abstract This paper was first read at a runic event held in Eichstätt in 2012 and was subsequently, in a revised and extended form, presented at the symposium on the Early History of the North-Sea Germanic Languages that took place in Odense on 13 March 2018. The paper is highly relevant to the theme of the Odense conference as well as to this special issue of NOWELE in that it deals with the runes and the language of the Undley bracteate, a stray runic find from the late fifth century discovered at Undley in Suffolk in the south-east of England. My presentation will focus on the vocalism of the Undley legend. But the linguistic perspective will be widened considerably, and I shall discuss and criticize in detail some of the major proposals for reading and interpreting this inscription within a North-Sea Germanic and Pre-Old English context.

Investing in multimedia-guides is discussed as a strategic decision for visitor attractions. Previous research shows that multimedia-guide usage increases customer interaction and satisfaction. However, current literature lacks empirical evidence on whether in nostalgia evoking visitor attractions, multimedia-guide usage increases satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth or not. Moderating effect of multimedia-guide usage on the nostalgia and willingness to share positive word-of-mouth association was analysed using a field-experiment in a German Wax museum (N = 241). A moderated moderation included perceived visitor attraction content age as a three-way-interaction. Results show that the positive impact of perceived nostalgia on willingness to share positive word-of-mouth is weaker for multimedia-guide users. The older visitors perceive visitor attraction’s content, the weaker is the negative moderating effect of multimedia-guide usage on the nostalgia to positive word-of-mouth association. Our results indicate that nostalgic visitor attractions might need to rethink multimedia-guide usage.