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This paper presents the Swedish National Doctoral School in Digital Humanities: Data, Culture, and Society – Critical Perspectives (DASH) that is run in 2023–2027 by Uppsala University, Umeå University, Linnaeus University, and Gothenburg University. Though Swedish universities have established PhD courses, MA programmes and training in digital humanities previously, DASH is the first encompassing educational programme in digital humanities at the doctoral level. The present paper discusses the rationale behind the DASH doctoral school, its role in the landscape of Swedish humanities infrastructures, and provides insights from the first PhD courses and seminars. The focus of DASH is to equip PhD candidates in humanities and social sciences with knowledge and skills necessary to pursue high quality, innovative and critical research in digital humanities. DASH aims to provide knowledge in relation to digital research, its methods, tools, and critical perspectives, and to build and strengthen the networks among early career scholars. DASH facilitates access and use of the resources in the national infrastructures in the humanities, but also emerges as an element in the infrastructure by providing new resources and competences.

Talk at the Huminfra seminar "AI and the Library: Subject Descriptions in the Era of Artificial Intelligence", Borås, 29 January 2024

Linnaeus University (Linnéuniversitetet, LNU) is an international public university in the province of Småland, Sweden. LNU was founded in 2010 by a merger of the former Växjö University and Kalmar University, and currently has approximately 44,000 enrolled students. The university is currently Sweden’s sixth largest in terms of student numbers. It has 600 partner universities in more than 80 countries around the world. Over the past decade, there has been a distinct emphasis on the Digital Humanities at LNU through a variety of initiatives, all focused on fostering interdisciplinary expertise in the Humanities, data analysis, cultural heritage, and ICTs. Best described as a decentralized collaborative culture, DH at LNU includes knowledge environments (e.g. Digital Transformations), centers of excellence (e.g. the Centre for Data Intensive Sciences and Applications), and the iInstitute (the local center for the international iSchools consortium). LNU was the first Swedish university to join DARIAH and is now leading the bid for national membership. In 2016, Linnaeus established a Digital Humanities Hub to focus on data-intensive digital humanities, leading to the implementation of digital humanities as a research and teaching subject at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and to the Digital Humanities MA programme. This programme is being offered in English to international students, who benefit from being able to take advantage of the worldwide iSchools agreement for virtual student and faculty exchange. As part of the work of the DH Hub and the iInstitute, LNU was recently granted funding for a national PhD school in digital humanities, an initiative between four Swedish universities. In this presentation we will outline the original vision for fostering DH at Linnaeus University, reflect on the challenges and successes of the past few years and present general ideas on how to facilitate DH at the intersection of multiple disciplines.

This article addresses the underutilization of knowl­edge organization systems (KOS) elements in online library catalogs, hindering effective subject-based search and discovery. It highlights the International Society for Knowl­edge Organization's initiative to develop metadata guidelines for library catalog procurement, focusing on maximizing the value of subject metadata from classification systems and controlled vocabularies. The paper discusses the rationale for quality subject access, proposes desirable search functionalities based on research, explores implementation challenges, and outlines future developments. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of providing quality subject access in digital services and calls for further research on interface design, guideline adoption, KOS evolution, and the impact of language models on subject metadata use. The work underscores the need for applying controlled vocabularies in search interfaces across libraries, archives, and museums while acknowledging the complementary role of alternative approaches like social tagging and automatic indexing. Extensive future research is suggested to implement search functionalities, promote guidelines adoption, enhance KOS evolution, and assess the influence of language models on subject metadata utilization., Erratum available at: https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2024-4-286

Fiction is a challenging genre for automatic theme identification. Unlike other types of documents, such as physics academic papers, fiction does not always name the concepts it addresses, but rather implies them through subtle clues. Fiction also uses metaphors intentionally to convey deeper meanings. To make Swedish LGBTQ+ fiction more accessible, the Queerlit database (https://queerlit.dh.gu.se/) provides subject indexing by information professionals. They use the QLIT thesaurus (based on Homosaurus) for LGBTQ+ themes and Swedish Subject Headings (SAO – Svenska Ämnesord) for non-LGBTQ+ themes. The indexing is comprehensive and retrospective, assigning terms to previously published Swedish fiction. This work aims to determine to what degree and under which conditions is it possible to automatically assign subject index terms from QLIT, in order to estimate the usefulness of automatic tools to support subject indexing conducted by information professionals. This process may require a large number of training documents which are not available (the entire Queerlit database has about 2000 works indexed and QLIT has about 800 terms, while SAO is much bigger). Therefore, another approach will be explored – whether automatically extracted terms from the texts provide the potential to complement existing, professionally assigned terms from QLIT and SAO. We experiment with zero-shot classification transformers and topic modeling. The proposed paper will present the intermediate results of different methods applied to available texts from the QLIT database. It is important to note that the project is currently in an exploratory phase and that the presentation is intended to showcase how different approaches have both failed and succeeded. We also intend to highlight areas of possible applicability specifically from the perspective afforded by the QLIT thesaurus, i.e., the appropriateness of the methods for Swedish LGBTQ+ fiction. We will also discuss the challenges and limi

We are currently in a phase where it seems that new applications for large language models (LLMs) in general and generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) in particular are tested every day. Examples are as diverse as automated data mining for building energy management (C. Zhang et al., 2024), evaluating the accuracy of differential-diagnosis lists for clinical vignettes (Hirosawa et al., 2023), and human-machine-augmented intelligent vehicles (J. Zhang et al., 2023). They can also be used to extract structured information from unstructured text (Söderström, 2023). This poster presents a pilot study on one such application, the potential use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT for automatic subject indexing of archival documents in Swedish, Swedish LGBTQ fiction and Chinese fiction. The accuracy of the assigned subject index terms is compared with the output from ANNIF (Suominen et al., 2022), an established automatic subject indexing software used in libraries. The results display an impressive degree of accuracy for the subject index terms assigned by ChatGPT, but challenges have been identified in all three document types. For example, the appropriateness of the terms for historical text is highly questionable at times. The terms assigned by ANNIF, in contrast, are drawn from a controlled vocabulary, which ensures that they have been manually selected as suitable subject index terms. The pilot study shows that it is feasible to run the index terms suggested by ChatGPT through ANNIF to get index terms from a controlled vocabulary while harnessing ChatGPT’s state-of-the-art natural language understanding. This presents intriguing opportunities for implementing GPTs in the archival/library cataloging workflows. Semi-automatic approaches and manual checks are still to be preferred, however, in order to maintain the authenticity of the generated metadata.

Has something been lost in the move towards federated searching and relevance ranking in academic library search interfaces? The richness of metadata and other knowledge organisation systems (KOSs) such as classification schemes and controlled vocabularies is often not featured in library management system (LMS) procurement. The ISKO Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) has set up a working group to develop a set of guidelines for academic and research libraries that are planning to procure an LMS. The purpose of the guidelines is to enable users to benefit from the intellectual effort that has been invested in assigning metadata to electronic resources. This paper reports on progress of the working group in its review of the literature and the plans for consultations with stakeholders.

Subject indexing of LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, and ace) materials is often criticized for being too general and superficial, as general subject headings systems rarely provide the desirable depth and breadth. LGBTQ+ fiction is an even bigger problem because fiction is most often indexed only for genre, place, and time, while themes remain unaddressed. Thus, many readers look outside the library catalogue to identify LGBTQ+ titles in social medial, personal social networks, or web search engines. This exploratory study builds on the Queerlit database of over 1800 Swedish LGBTQ+ works of fiction which have been subject indexed using a dedicated thesaurus. It aims to identify and discuss how Queerlit subject terms compare with those in the Swedish Union Catalogue (Libris), the social cataloguing website Goodreads as well as the Google Books API. In addition, subject access to LGBTQ+ works of fiction in China is discussed, particularly via Douban, the social networking platform.

Invited panel talk at DARIAH Day for Iceland, 31 May 2024Ej belagd 240624

DHNB Workshop on Higher Education in DH, Reykjavik, May 2024

Ej belagd 231213

Huminfra

Dimpah project

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project.

This work focuses on questions of knowledge organization related to literary fiction. How can LGBTQI fictional literature become more accessible to readers and scholars? The project Queerlit Metadata Development and Searchability for LGBTQI Literary Heritage addresses this question in two ways: by the development of a thesaurus for the description of Swedish LGBTQI literature, and by building a curated bibliographical database for this material with flexible search options. Despite the community and scholarly interest in LGBTQI literature, relevant LGBTQI literature is hard to find both for readers and researchers. Subject indexing is underdeveloped for this topic, and subject headings have been historically inadequate and offensive. The paper focuses on how LGBTQI literature can be made more easily accessible through subject indexing. This will make new research possible, such as gaining overviews of the development of specific themes over time, the presence of LGBTQI literature within or outside of the literary canon or in different genres and changing ideas and perceptions concerning sexualities and gender identities. It will also accommodate user’s needs of better access to LGBTQI themed fictional literature.