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A major attraction in Arctic tourism is the presence of indigenous cultures. However, many tourists have only limited opportunities to access indigenous culture and sites, as long as they are not spatially and temporally fixed. This puts museums at the center of attention and gives them a core role in portraying and interpreting indigenous heritage. A dual role with the responsibility to collect, preserve, use, and develop heritage while at the same time appealing to various visitor groups is challenging, not least in a time of Arctification, luring new visitor groups with various touristic imaginaries to the North. This article reports on an assessment of two indigenous museums in Arctic Sweden. The research reveals that the responsible managers at the museums are aware of the dual role of museums, and need to navigate in a complex environment of local and global expectations based on preconceived notions. The museums are important nodes, and contribute to place-making in peripheral localities in the North.

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) automatically allocates scores to essays at scale and may help teachers reduce the heavy burden during grading activities. Recently, researchers have deployed neural-based AES approaches to improve upon the state-of-the-art AES performance. These neural-based AES methods mainly take student essays as the sole input and focus on learning the relationship between student essays and essay scores through deep neural networks. However, their only product, the predicted holistic score, is far from providing adequate pedagogical information, such as automated writing evaluation (AWE). In this work, we propose Topic-aware BERT, a new method of learning relations among scores, student essays, as well as topical information in essay instructions. Beyond improving the AES benchmark performance, Topic-aware BERT can automatically retrieve key topical sentences in student essays by probing self-attention maps in intermediate layers. We evaluate the performance of Topic-aware BERT of different variants to (i) perform AES and (ii) retrieve key topical sentences using the open dataset Automated Student Assessment Prize and a manually annotated dataset. Our experiments show that Topic-aware BERT achieves a strong AES performance compared with the previous best neural-based AES methods and demonstrates effectiveness in identifying key topical sentences in argumentative essays. This article belongs to the Special Issue Artificial Intelligence Solutions and Applications for Distributed Systems in Smart Spaces

This article explains differences between historiographical accounts by comparing the working process of contemporary historians to the art of mosaic. The metaphor is cast in a postmodern – particularly constructivist – light. The nature of historians’ object of study (historical reality), of source materials, and of historians’ aim to create meaning are considered essential factors in leading to differentiation in historiography. Six elements are distinguished in the mosaic metaphor: (1) the raw materials, (2) the mosaic tiles, (3) the glue which holds these tiles together and bridges the spaces between them, (4) the flow and direction of tiles as they are arranged, (5) larger constellations into which tiles are organised, and (6) the mosaic. The former three help explain the process of interpreting sources through the creation of inferences, or the process of contextualization. The latter three explore associative creative reasoning, individuality, and the link between them as inducing historiographical differentiation. Genom att likna den samtida historikerns arbete med läggandet av en mosaik diskuterar denna artikel uppkomsten av skilda historiska berättelser. Mosaikmetaforen utgår från en postmodern – särskilt konstruktivistisk – synvinkel. Artikeln lyfter fram tre betydelsefulla faktorer som leder till skillnader i historieskrivningen; växelspelet mellan historikerns studieobjekt (historisk verklighet), tillgängligt källmaterial och historikerns strävan att skapa mening. Sex delar urskiljs i mosaikmetaforen: (1) råvarorna, (2) mosaikplattorna, (3) fogmassan som håller samman plattorna och fyller ut utrymmena mellan dem, (4) ordnandet av plattornas förhållande och riktning, (5) större konstellationer som plattorna är organiserade i, och (6) mosaiken som helhet. De tre förstnämnda hjälper till att förklara processen att tolka källor genom skapandet av slutledningar och sammanhang. De tre sistnämnda utforskar associativt skapande resonemang, särprägel och kopplingen mellan dem som ger upphov till skilda historiska berättelser.

This article examines history mediation and the relationship between education and academia. The aim is to investigate historical representations of the Christianisation in Sweden from 1915 to 1996, by doing a comparative analysis of the content in research publications and history textbooks for upper secondary school (or the equivalent). The research field and the textbooks are perceived as two different knowledge arenas. The analysis shows how the two arenas are more harmonious and consistent in their representations of Christianisation during the early twentieth century. In the mid-twentieth century, the arenas deviated from each other for an extended period, before finally becoming more unitary again by the end of the century. The impact of the schools’ steering documents, as well as the distinctiveness of the two arenas, seems to constitute the conditions for inconsistencies between them at different times. The analysis also suggests that the educational applicability of the knowledge content in contemporary research, likewise impacts the relationship between the two arenas.

Mutual benefit societies evolved as the major provider for sickness, accident and life insurance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the major problems facing insurers was the risk of adverse selection, i.e. that unhealthy individuals had more incentives than healthy individuals to insure when priced for the average risk. By empirically examining whether longevity among insured individuals in a nationwide mutual health society was different from a matched sample of uninsured individuals, we seek to identify the presence of adverse selection. We find no compelling evidence showing that unhealthy individuals were more likely to insure, or reasons to believe that problems related to adverse selection would have been a major reason for government intervention in the health insurance market in Sweden.

In the past few centuries, an accelerating process of legalization and classification have moulded the diverse range of earlier institutions into a limited number of isomorphic organizational forms. Today, institutions of higher education, with their roots in the corporate forms of medieval universities, can also have the legal status of, for example, government agencies, associations under public law, foundations, and joint stock companies. This article investigates the types of legal entities Swedish and Finnish institutions of higher education have been organized into in the period from the 1990s until 2020, and why these particular types have been chosen. It also explores how the special characteristics, aims, and demands of the university have caused adaptations to organizational forms such as joint stock companies and foundations. Comparative studies benefit from investigating societies that are as similar to each other as possible, making it easier to identify and isolate the effects of the factors that actually differ. In this respect, Finland and Sweden are ideal for comparative studies. Both Swedish and Finnish institutions of higher education have experienced coercive, mimetic, normative, and managerial-professional isomorphic pressure. However, there are important pre-existing national differences, such as the greater reliance on public agencies in Sweden and the multiplicity of semi-private legal entities in Finland, most significantly the associations under public law. These differences made the transition of universities into independent legal entities seem natural in Finland in 2009, while it was too radical in the Swedish context. 

Abstract The Old Wood in a New Light database project focuses on the digitization and accessibility of the results of dendrochronological samples analyzed and archived at four Swedish university-based tree-ring laboratories at Lund University, Stockholm University, University of Gothenburg, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Collaboration with the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory and Humlab at Umeå University enables long-term open access to data, raw data, and metadata. In this project, we (1) systematically undertake large-scale entry and open access publication of results from wood samples scientifically analyzed and archived by Swedish laboratories and the associated metadata, into the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD; www.sead.se) research data infrastructure, and (2) actively promote the database as a resource for new and ongoing interdisciplinary research initiatives. Including dendrochronological data in SEAD infrastructure allows interdisciplinary studies that combine major scientific and societal questions. Building on a pilot study of construction timber from southern Sweden and adaptation of SEAD digitization workflows, more than 70 000 samples archived at the four dendrochronological laboratories are now being handled in the project. The broad coverage of research networks, stakeholder interaction, and strategic support from the cultural heritage community is guaranteed owing to the ongoing collaboration between laboratories and an established international and multidisciplinary reference group.

The purpose of my article is to highlight the development and activities of the Catholic traditionalist minority groups and discuss their importance in today’s Catholic Church. The traditionalist movement started as a reaction to the reforms implemented as a result of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which for many conservative-minded Catholics appeared as a departure from Catholic faith and tradition. To safeguard what was perceived as true Catholicism, these traditionalist groups, with the Fraternity of St Pius X (SSPX) at the forefront, erected parishes and mission centres alongside the ordinary Catholic parish structures. In 1988, the leader of the movement, the retired French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, consecrated four of his priests to bishops without papal permission, thus triggering automatic excommunication. Since then, the traditionalist movement has been divided into two branches, as some members disassociated themselves from SSPX and with the approval of the Holy See formed new traditionalist societies, among them the Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP). A common characteristic is the adherence to a pre-conciliar ecclesiastical order, above all the so-called Tridentine liturgy that is regarded a prerequisite for dogmatic orthodoxy. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI made the Tridentine liturgy an integral part of Catholic worship as an extraordinary form of the Roman rite. The purpose was to pave the way for a reconciliation with SSPX but also to contribute to a more dignified celebration of the new Mass. This led to a strong expansion of the celebration of the old liturgy. With the decree Traditionis custodes from 2021, Pope Francis abolished this bi-ritual order and introduced strict regulations for the use of theold liturgy. By intervening as a ”guardian of tradition” the pope emphasized the normative function of the Vatican II and the reformed liturgy and at the same time opened up to give the traditionalist minority a new place within the framework of the Catholic ecclesiastical order.

Engaging with scholarship on hegemony, park history, and in particular with Sevilla-Buitrago’s analysis of Central Park as a pedagogical space, this article traces the establishment of two parks in the Swedish textile industry centre of Norrköping. These parks, bearing very similar names – Folkparken and Folkets Park – were established just six years apart. But though both parks linked “park” and “people” ( Folk), their intended political effects were radically different. The 1895 Folkparken was an elite attempt to create a de-politicised landscape park, while the 1901 Folkets Park was instead the labour movement’s attempt to create their own space. Exploring this latter park enables telling a story of park production beyond elite dominance. Like dozens of similar labour-controlled parks across Sweden, the People’s Park allowed Norrköping’s labour movement to shape their landscape long before the Social Democrats made any significant inroads into parliamentary politics. Combining a platform for socialistic agitation, with a theatre and space for recreation, this park quickly became central to Norrköping’s working class. Thereby, it could both enable social-democratic presence at an everyday level, and function as an important resource during periods of intense class-struggle.

This article investigates the modern history of genealogy through the lens of keyword indexes – an essential resource for access to genealogical information. Empirically, the article studies the role of indexes in Euro-American genealogy from the nineteenth century to today. Particular attention is paid to the 1960s–2010s, when genealogy changed through growing popular engagement, new technologies, rising and falling academic interest, and increased commercialisation. Focusing on a set of grassroots cases from Sweden that have been crucial to the subfield of Swedish-American genealogy, the article explores the work of local Swedish heritage societies and the dream of empirical ‘totality’; the cooperation between heritage societies and academic historians; the impact of microfilm and digital technologies in creating a sense of information overload; the economy of unpaid volunteer and state-subsidised labour; and how paper-based indexes, created largely through grassroots initiatives, have been transformed into digital commodities on an international genealogical market. While this is an important enquiry for understanding the history of genealogy – one of the most widespread popular pursuits in modern history – it also addresses the intricate relations between grassroots initiatives, academic research, and capitalism in modern archive history.