Digital History in Sweden

Towards the end of the 6^th Digital History in Sweden conference¹ some of us were talking about how great it woudl be to:

1. Have a public archive of the conference.
2. Have a an overview of the different Digital History projects in Sweden.

This repository is my way to address both at once, and use them as an excuse to learn more about JavaScript.

The site is built using the Quarto framework², which is a great tool for creating (static) websites, presentations slides, documents and more. Some simple is used to sort and format the data about projects and JavaScript, specifically the D3³ framework, to draw the visualisations and manage interactivity.

Methodology and Definitions

The data gathered about Digital History projects in Sweden is far from complete, and it will probably remain incomplete. I started by adding a small number of Digital History that I already knew about, just to have some data to work with while testing different approaches to visualising them. From there I started going through the programmes from the previous Digital History in Sweden conferences, and searching through the university research portals for more Digital History projects. Since Digital History was not available as a category, so I browsed and skimmed through the lists and project descriptions of several universities to determine which projects are likely to be counted as Digital History. When I got close to listing 100 projects I turned to the research portal of the Swedish National Heritage Board to find Digital History projects that they have financed. Though there are many more universities and financiers left to go through, 147 entries is high enough that it is publishable.

What counts as a digital history project? I have been trying to use a very open definition, and aim to include:

• Research using digital methods
• Research about digitisation
• Digitisation of materials
• Mediation of history using digital means

The unit of observation is a project, irregardless of the size of the funds, the number of participants or the number of publications.

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Footnotes

1. or DH6SWE as I like to abbreviate it. ↩

2. https://quarto.org/ ↩

3. https://d3js.org/ ↩