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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. 

The intent of this examination is to study anatomical jewelry design, withreproductions of the clitoris and uterus, its feminist connection and symbolism.Three Swedish female designers represent the foundation for this study, wheretheir specific jewelry is analyzed. Choice of designers are Clit co,Feministsmeden and Statement by Lann, a presentation of them can be found inthe second part on page 15. The main question in this study is; How come thewoman's body and genitals have become jewelry and how are these symbolslinked to feminism? Are these anatomical images inclusive or exclusive from agender perspective? The method in this survey focuses on semiotics and imageanalysis with inspiration from discourse analysis and hermeneutics, with atheory rooted in gender, feminism and exposition of the female body. Byfocusing on signification and intention, the study reaches a hypotheticalconclusion about the connection between anatomical jewelry and feminism.  Syftet med denna undersökning är att studera anatomisk smyckesdesign, med återgivningenav klitoris och livmodern, dess feministiska anknytning och symbolik. Tre svenska kvinnligadesigners står som material för studien, där deras specifika smycken analyseras. I del två avarbetet presenteras de utvalda kreatörerna Clit co, Feministsmeden och Statement by Lann.Huvudfrågan i denna studie är; Hur kommer det sig att kvinnans kropp och könsorgan harblivit smycken och hur är dessa symboler kopplade till feminism? Är dessa anatomiskaskildringar inkluderande eller exkluderande ur ett genusperspektiv? Metoden i studienfokuserar på semiotisk bildanalys med inspiration ur diskursanalys och hermeneutik, medteori förankrad i genus, feminism och kroppspolitik. Genom att fokusera på budskap ochintention når studien en hypotetisk slutsats kring sambandet mellan anatomiska smycken ochfeminism.

Västergarn is a medieval settlement situated on the west coast of the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. It has for a long time been the focus of study for researchers due to its cultural heritage in regards of its church, rampart and archaeological remains of a settlement dating to the Early Middle Ages. The University of Uppsala conducted excavations at the site during 2005–2013 which have led to large amounts of archaeological material which enabled several theses being written about the place. This thesis aims to study metal dress accessories from Västergarn and the people behind these artifacts who lived there during the early medieval period. Gender identity, ethnicity and cultural belonging will be addressed. The main part of the thesis focuses on typology and chronology. This will be achieved by a morphological study of the material. In addition to this, an ArcGis study is conducted to study distribution patterns in the settlement. The conclusion is that dress accessories allow different conclusions on the population of Västergarn. In terms of gender, it is argued that both men and women were present, albeit artefacts of male gender dominate the assemblages. The majority of the material in terms of ethnicity and cultural identity can be attributed to a Gotlandic tradition, while some dress accessories seem to come from abroad, to the Slavonic areas and other regions in the Baltic Sea. Also, oriental influences can be seen, mainly in regard to the decorated belt mounts. in conclusion, the result of this thesis indicates that two separate groups, both Gotlanders and non-Gotlanders were active in Västergarn during the early Middle Ages which is visible in the two churches, the Baltic ware pottery and the form of dress accessories people wore at the time.

Pre-processing Arabic text for Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems poses major challenges, as Arabic omits short vowels in writing. This omission leads to a large number of homographs, and means that Arabic text needs to be diacritized to disambiguate these homographs, in order to be matched up with the intended pronunciation. Diacritizing Arabic has generally been achieved by using rule-based, statistical, or hybrid methods that combine rule-based and statistical methods. Recently, diacritization methods involving deep learning have shown promise in reducing error rates. These deep-learning methods are not yet commonly used in TTS engines, however. To examine neural diacritization methods for use in TTS engines, we normalized and pre-processed a version of the Tashkeela corpus, a large diacritized corpus containing largely Classical Arabic texts, for TTS purposes. We then trained and tested three state-of-the-art Recurrent-Neural-Network-based models on this data set. Additionally we tested these models on the Wiki News corpus, a test set that contains Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) news articles and thus more closely resembles most TTS queries. The models were evaluated by comparing the Diacritic Error Rate (DER) and Word Error Rate (WER) achieved for each data set to one another and to the DER and WER reported in the original papers. Moreover, the per-diacritic accuracy was examined, and a manual evaluation was performed. For the Tashkeela corpus, all models achieved a lower DER and WER than reported in the original papers. This was largely the result of using more training data in addition to the TTS pre-processing steps that were performed on the data. For the Wiki News corpus, the error rates were higher, largely due to the domain gap between the data sets. We found that for both data sets the models overfit on common patterns and the most common diacritic. For the Wiki News corpus the models struggled with Named Entities and loanwords. Purely neural models generally outperformed the model that combined deep learning with rule-based and statistical corrections. These findings highlight the usability of deep learning methods for Arabic diacritization in TTS engines as well as the need for diacritized corpora that are more representative of Modern Standard Arabic.

The history of California is in many ways a story about water, and the outsized effect that droughts, floods, and seasonal precipitation rates have had on the political and economic development of the state over the past 170 years. This thesis uses discourse analysis of historical and ongoing negotiations that have been presented in federal and state reports, narratives, case laws and legislation to explore how the discourse around water politics has been shaped in the state. From this, an antiessentialist environmental history develops around the relationship between overdrafted groundwater basins in the Central Valley and the agriculture industry located there. Finally, this thesis explores what the future of a waterscape built during the capitalization of modern society may look like as we move towards a new regime of nature.

The burial type referred to as bundle burials was a rare occurrence during the Neolithic era and little research has been done on the topic. Three graves from the Ajvide/Jakobs site at Eksta parish, Gotland have been identified as this specific type of burial. There are several potential explanations to why this type of burial would potentially occasionally be implemented or why the excavated remains would be found in this types of positions. The purpose of this thesis is to present and search for different explanations to this phenomenon. Furthermore, the main purpose of the study is to explore how taphonomic research can potentially deepen our knowledge regarding rituals and practices of the past, particularly within the field of mortuary archaeology. Paketgravar under den neolitiska perioden är en ovanlig förekomst och lite forskning har gjorts om ämnet. Totalt tre paketgravar har identifierats vid Ajvide /Jakobs, Eksta socken på Gotland. Det finns många möjliga förklaringar till varför denna typ av begravning potentiellt skulle kunna praktiserats eller varför benelementen skulle kunna påträffats i dessa typer av positioner. Syftet med denna uppsats är att presentera och undersöka olika möjliga förklaringar till detta ovanliga gravskick. Vidare är syftet med studien även att utforska hur tafonomisk forskning potentiellt kan fördjupa vår kunskap om ritualer från det förflutna, framförallt inom gravarkeologi.

This thesis on the Swedish voluntary women’s defence organisation Riksförbundet Sveriges lottakårer (SLK), studies how the board and the members of SLK discussed the problems and the meaning of voluntary defence work during the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore the thesis aims to engage with previous research and give an explanation to why people may be interested in voluntary defence. Views varied greatly within SLK: some meant that the voluntary grounds of participation gave a sense of elite status to the organisation; however others saw voluntary work as untenable, since more women at the time had both work and family obligations. Another issue was professionalisation versus socialisation. While some members wanted to see a centralisation and professionalisation of the organisation, others found it more important to safeguard the social functions and independence of the local corps unit. The results suggest that gender structures as well as individual agency create multiple reasons and meanings behind voluntary defence work.

This master thesis aims to show how a qualitative approach to early modern medical practitioners’ perspectives can provide a basis for a better understanding of the disease of dysentery. The focus is on: 1) How the disease of dysentery was described and how the challenge of dysentery was perceived. 2) What individual measure and commitments were taken for the patients and why. 3) How the cause of the disease was understood and explained. 4) How perspectives differed between physicians and surgeons.Of particular interest when it comes to the disease of dysentery is how the disease and its cause were perceived.Eleven texts written by mainly British medical practitioners from primary sources such as reports, logbooks and letters on dysentery written during the years 1740 - 1800 have been used for close readings and a qualitative analysis was performed on the collected data.The analysis showed (i) that medical practitioners expressed considerable interest in dysentery and in trying to understand it as a great suffering for individuals, for society and for humanity as a whole. (ii) Medical practitioners took treatment measures based on how they understood the cause of the disease outbreak. Either the dysentery was referred to internal causes, as sickness in organs, especially the organs that produced bodily fluids, or it was referred to external causes, as a sickness caused by heat, cold, weather, winds, air, climate, seasons, lunar position, etc. (iii) The cause of the disease was understood and explained both as an infection and as a pre-disposition for imbalances in body fluids. (iv) Both physicians and surgeons understood that the disease of dysentery was a global phenomenon and that the disease often was connected to the climate and weather. This standpoint was based on the fact that dysentery distinguished itself as an autumnal disease. Its eruption usually began with a few scattered cases in July, then increased in August and culminated in September. Theories about the disease, its causes and treatment did not differ significantly between physicians and surgeons. However, the views of different physicians did differ.The thematic map of understanding related to disease of dysentery, shows that medical practitioners’ knowledge, theories and ideas behind the medical practice of dysentery, have an ambiguity in the view of both the dysentery and the treatment of it. This was probably due to interpretation based both on observable causes of diseases, and on a more theoretical abstract meaning, where diseases to a greater extent was understood on the basis of symptoms and signs.It is suggested that regardless of the knowledge base of the individual medical practitioner, no one represented an independent knowledge base for their treatment of dysentery; rather they participated actively with each other in a mutually constitutive way in order to shape their understanding of the dysentery. This theses’ qualitative approach, allows dysentery patients and their medical practitioners via the texts of the medical practitioners, to offer very personal accounts of a highly contagious disease.