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This project examines the influence of the myth of Danish design on the consumption of Danish furniture. Danish design has historically been associated with qualities such as timelessness, craftsmanship, tradition and beauty and has played a significant role in the development of Danish society and culture. The construction of the category of modernist Danish design and its narratives was shaped by a social network of individuals and organizations, linking Danish design to notions of good taste and healthy living. Today, Danish design is praised for the same understated and high-quality features which legitimize its contemporary success.By drawing on Roland Barthes' theory of myth and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, this study investigates both the way in which the myth of Danish design is created, and consumed. The analysis combines a semiotic examination of Danish design mythology with a conceptual content analysis of interviews conducted by a Danish furniture company, Fredericia, as part of their celebration of Børge Mogensen's Folkestolen’s 75th anniversary.The findings reveal that the myth of Danish design influences the consumption of Danish furniture by communicating symbolic valuations associated with positive attributes such as beauty, timelessness, and fine craftsmanship. Simultaneously, the myth perpetuates ideological narratives that serve the interests of dominant power groups in society, including the Danish nation state, the furniture industry and even certain groups of consumers. The furniture industry strategically exploits the myth to drive desirability and capitalize on the associations carried within Danish design.This research underscores the sociocultural function of myth, which constructs markers of social, national, and personal identity. Danish furniture transcends its functional and aesthetic aspects, becoming a symbol of economic and cultural wealth and social status. Simultaneously, the myth of Danish design distorts ideological narratives around class dominance and power and naturalizes the notions of nationalism and Danishness into signifieds of tradition, health, functionalism, sustainability, and social accessibility. The analysis situates consumption within the context of cultural capital, modern mythology, and late-stage capitalism, highlighting the transformation of furniture into tools for managing self-identity, and signifiers of social status and taste. The holders of cultural capital benefit from perpetuating the myth of Danish design, securing both material and symbolic profits from ownership of Danish furniture. Thus the class elite utilizes its cultural competence to maintain its capital and power dominance in society, as cultural capital reproduces social structures.This research investigates the complex interplay between the myth of Danish design, the consumption of Danish furniture, and their sociocultural implications. By critically examining the myth's influence, this study offers insights into the mechanisms by which design narratives and cultural capital shape consumption and perpetuate power dynamics in society.

This paper examines how Russian President Vladimir Putin incorporates the use of history in his speeches and articles with regards to how he positions Russia in its relation to Ukraine. The analysis is structured around three central places of remembrance (danish: erindringssteder): The Kyivan Rus which focuses on the close historical relation between Ukraine and Russia; the heritage of the Sovietunion in relation to how the union defined the borders of Soviet-Ukraine; World War II, ukrainian nationalism and its relation to nazism which centers around how Putin relates nazism to the current ukrainian political elite. The analysis concludes that Putin primarily utilizes the three places of remembrance to legitimize Russia's current invasion of Ukraine. Putin finds the distribution of territories during the soviet era to have been theft, and a complete violation of Russia's integrity. Furthermore, he seeks to protect ethnic russians within the borders of Ukraine from a genocide, instigated by ukrainian nationalists and neo-nazis, who continue the tradition of atrocities commited during World War II. Finally, Putin perceives Ukrainians and Russians as a single people, basing his claim on common history, language, and culture. Thus he implies that ukrainians should unite under Russia, as Russia is the more legitimate state.

This project will deep into the motives and reasons behind cultural destruction. It will underline the will to entirely wipe off a distinctive group of population and its culture. Taking Syria as our main case given the events of the last decade; centring in the civil war where lives and art have been lost forever, together with the morale of its population, which fled to other countries in big numbers throughout the war. As for the perpetrators, ISIS will be the focus of our project, guilty of intentionally destroying many monuments, especially in Syria. Before explaining and answering to the questions of the project regarding culture, it is more than mandatory to analyse Syria’s history, tribes and regions. After reaching the core of our project and describing the possible reasons behind these actions, the third part of our project, which focuses on the emotional sphere of the victims. War brings with itself grief, loss, damage and destruction to a country and its material environment. To focus on the emotional attachment and emotional damage during this war shall be a matter of discussion nevertheless. We will not only analyse and discuss cultural destruction and the loss for humanity whenever perpetrators decide to damage forever something so important as our, as humans, common and singular past.

This paper revolves around the development of an LSTM multiclass classifier, constructed using Keras as framework and CRISP-DM as project process, with the purpose of classifying natural language into varying degrees of toxicity. The model takes a starting point in an existing toxic comment classification challenge from Kaggle.com, and makes a first iteration, engineered towards the requirements in the challenge. In this first iteration, several measures are taken to avoid common pitfalls of neural networks. The model is then held up against principles of freedom of speech including The Harm Principle and The Offence Principle by John Stuart Mill and Joel Feinberg respectively. After evaluating upon the models performance in the light of these principles, a second iteration is constructed with some design changes. For reasons i.a. related to the dataset, this operation is less successful. The paper concludes that it is possible to make a good multiclassification tool for shallow NLP problem, but gets less efficient in later iterations as we try to apply it to more concrete purposes.

This project was set out to explore the role of the Turing Test in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with emphasis on the historical perspective. This report contains an introductory presentation of the Turing Test and Artificial Intelligence. Furthermore, it presents two methods for analysis. The first method is a quantitative search in extracting the number of results from Google Scholars for search range between 1950 and 2019. The searched terms are ‘Turing Test’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’. The second method is the one used for the analysis of two case studies, ELIZA and Google Duplex. In exploring the historical development, ELIZA is an early research topic from 1966 and Google Duplex is a contemporary project from 2018. This report concludes that the Turing Test appears to have played a role in the historical development of AI. Results from the quantitative search show that there is an exponential growth, followed by a short stabilisation, before it begins to decay towards the last decade. Both case studies failed when subjected to a strict Turing Test. Though when subjected to the Total Turing Test, Google Duplex seems to surpass it. Finally, this report also concludes that the Turing Test may no longer be relevant, as mediums for AI have evolved beyond text-based and most developments are no longer concerned with tricking humans.

The field of subtitling is certainly one of the underrated and underexplored areas in the academic world. This project intends to outline the lengthy evolution of subtitles as it was being shaped throughout the last century by experimenting with its different forms and uses. The historical perspective sheds light on the field of subtitling and looks at its functions, technology, and usages, tracing its change from the origin to its present-day form. The intention of covering the historical side of the field is to familiarize the reader with the profession and its practices before stepping into a more detailed observation, covering linguistic and semiotic elements of subtitling. As a medium of communication, it is a field that can reach countless viewers. It can be used as a tool for educating the illiterate, deaf and the hard of hearing, students of second language, enriching vocabulary, maintaining language skills for the elderly, not to mention its capability of translating information to a non-native-speaker audience for the purpose of exchanging cultural wealth.

The motivation for this project was based on the newly founded movement DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) and their manifesto. The movement’s ideas and visions are based on the critique of the European Union’s handling of the economic, refugee and migration crisis’, that has been debated throughout Europe in recent years. With their manifesto, DiEM25 has formulated an idealistic alternative vision for the future Europe. This assignment seeks to find answers to what kind of alternative this is. More specifically; which kind of cosmopolitanism is expressed in the manifesto, and which European concept historical traditions this cosmopolitanism builds upon. The analysis conducted in this project will be a comparative concept historian analysis of the cosmopolitan vision formulated in the DiEM25 Manifesto. The assignment concludes that the manifesto entails a potential utopian cosmopolitan vision of re-democratising Europe, and more specifically the EU in our present modern and globalised world. Furthermore, it concludes that the the cosmopolitanism in the DiEM25 Manifesto builds on a long tradition of cosmopolitan ideas, leading back to Immanuel Kant initial ideas of cosmopolitanism, through post world war and the thoughts of Ulrich Beck up until the 21st century and the notion of New Cosmopolitanism.

This thesis examines how the university directive of 2003 changed the thoughts about and the processes on RUC. The theoretical framework is mainly Actor-Network Theory, which is used to help understand the network in which the actors are battling to give the object RUC meaning. The thesis does however also include Discourse Theory by Laclau and Mouffe to locate prevailing discourses about RUC. The thesis concludes that the university directive itself did not have a major influence on decision-making on RUC during the transition under rector Henrik Toft Jensen. However with the new rector Poul Holm in 2006 the possible fears of the directive was affirmed, as it enabled rector to make decisions based on intuition rather than democratic processes. The result was a step away from democracy and a leap towards business-like management. Poul Holm lasted a little more than two years, leaving an environment of distrust behind at the university, to be sorted his successors; Henning Salling-Olesen and Ib Poulsen who it seemed managed to find the middle ground between nurturing the university democracy and satisfying the political actors. Therefore the university law in itself did not harm RUC, however the consequence thereof started the biggest crisis at RUC in recent years.

This project examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and the historical, cultural, and societal periods surrounding, following its publication on April 10, 1925. Specifically, the Roaring Twenties (1920-29), the Great Depression (1929-39), and World War II (1939-45), in light of the wonder that it started out with lackluster reviews and only meager sales but later rose to international fame and popularity as the literary phenomenon we know today, all within the span of this specific generation. Applying a dualistic approach to the analysis, the project seeks to both study the literature and the culture, by introducing two different but complementing theoretical perspectives: The psychological perspective and the Marxist perspective. This is done to make sure that both the novel and its characters are analyzed from both an internal and an external perspective, to increase and to expand the understanding of Fitzgerald’s literary work and its impact on American culture and society. The project concludes that a reason the novel was not popular when it was first published is that the materialist and consumerist generation of the Roaring Twenties primarily identified with Daisy over Gatsby - and the way she chose her safety and esteem needs met with Tom Buchanan over her love needs and a life with Gatsby. Hence the perception and interpretation of a character like Jay Gatsby has changed radically through years of cultural and societal upheaval, which eventually caused the novel to finally be accepted and appreciated. In the 1920s, Gatsby was primarily seen as a critique of the lavishly spending and materialistic status quo, and people did not care much for that because of a bad social conscience, or they simply did not understand the critique. But later, in the 1940s, the American outlook had changed forever and so had their view of Gatsby, enthroning him instead as a hero, an icon and idol, and as a role model.

Through this paper, we examine the redesign process that the building of Nikolaj Church has gone through from the 1960ies, to how it appears today, as Nikolaj Kunsthal. The traces and layers have visible signs of a random design process through time. Nowadays the art centre aims for a coherent atmosphere and sense of place in an upcoming design process. Our analysis of textual data gathered from relevant documents and interviews with key stakeholders, relies on the development of a sociotechnical perspective. This perspective allows us to recognise the various agencies and networks in connection to the design process that emerge from the technical and social aspects, which are analysed. The findings emphasize the building as an actant and a network, that plays a crucial part in the design process.