Pelle Snickars

Finansiering för nytt EU-projekt – ”European History Reloaded”

  • 12 december 2017
  • Dela

Igår fick jag besked om att vi tilldelats medel till ett större europeiskt forskningsprojekt på Humlab kring cirkulation, appropriering och återutnyttjande av audiovisuellt kulturarv. Jag kommer att fungera som “principal investigator” (PI) för projektet ”European History Reloaded: Curation and Appropriation of Digital Audiovisual Heritage” som vi erhållit pengar för inom ramen för EU Horizon 2020-programmet kring Kulturarv. Projektet leds av Utrechts universitet och den totala finansieringen uppgår till drygt nio miljoner svenska kronor. Ambitionen med detta digitala humaniora-projektet är att förstå hur både populära och populistiska, subversiva och främlingsfientliga tolkningar av Europeisk historia idag cirkulerar på olika video-plattformar som YouTube eller Vimeo. Vilka nya perspektiv på europeisk historia och identitet kommer till uttryck genom återanvändning av digitalt kulturarv i videoformat? Snickars och Humlabs uppgift är att genom så kallad video fingerprinting-teknologi på algoritmisk väg analysera detta återbruk. Video fingerprinting är en teknik där programvara identifierar och kan extrahera karaktäristiska komponenter i en följd av bilder, vilket gör att återanvända sekvenser kan spåras även i mycket stora kulturella dataset av video. Tekniken har utvecklats i upphovsrättsligt ändamål för att hindra olaglig återanvändning, men approprieras i projektet för att studera nya former av digital deltagarkultur. Det generella syftet är att öka kunskapen kring hur deltagarkulturer på nätet idag återanvänder audiovisuellt kulturarv, inklusive dess konsekvenser för digital historiografi.


Sammanfattning på engelska för vårt “proposal to EC Horizon 2020 JPI Cultural Heritage, Call Digital Heritage”:

During the past decade, a massive body of audiovisual heritage has become digitally accessible, on websites of archives, through initiatives such as Europeana.eu and EUscreen.eu, and on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. The proposed project is the first to research the online circulation and appropriation of audiovisual heritage using an integrated and interdisciplinary approach. It combines state of the art tracing and tracking technologies, critical cultural analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to answer the questions: How do strategies of curation shape the appropriation of digitized heritage? What new perspectives on European history and identity do digital curations and appropriations of audiovisual heritage create? How can audiovisual archives better foster the re-use of Europe’s audiovisual heritage? The project’s case studies highlight European History from the Cold War to the Fall of the Berlin Wall and Migration in Europe—both urgent topics within debates about Europe’s past, identity and future. The project brings together interdisciplinary expertise in the curation of digital audiovisual heritage (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), contemporary European history (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Republic) and Digital Humanities (Umeå University, Sweden). It collaborates with leading stakeholders in the field, as Europeana.eu—and its main audiovisual aggregator EUscreen.eu—as well as the attached 35 audiovisual archives across Europe. To reach out to users of audiovisual heritage, the project will also co- operate with the European Association of History Educators and historiana.eu. The project’s outcomes will contribute to a better understanding of popular interpretations of European history circulating online. It will foster critical engagement with audiovisual heritage in a participatory media landscape, including the consequences of digital historiography. Based on outcomes, the project will advise heritage institutions about best practices of user-engaging curation. Outcomes will also provide history educators with accessible material to engage students working online with Europe’s audiovisual heritage.

Conference presentation at the British Museum

  • 9 november 2017
  • Dela

I am presently attending a conference at the marvelous British museum, 3D Imaging in Cultural Heritage. Tomorrow, I will give a talk on the various ways in which we have digitised and 3D scanned Christopher Polhems mechanical alphabet – with a particular focus on movement and friction. Essentially, my point is that a 3D model can be moved around – but you cannot move its parts. In an animation, on the other hand, all parts move – but you cannot steer movement yourself. In virtual reality you can do both – but at the expense of transporting yourself to nowhere. My slides can be downloaded here: snickars_presentation_london_2017.

Discovering Spotify – new thematic issue in the journal Culture Unbound

  • 31 oktober 2017
  • Dela

The thematic issue for the journal Culture Unbound which we have worked on for quite some time in our research project is now published: Discovering Spotify. I have written one longer article on Spotify Radio, as well as an introductory editorial with Rasmus Fleischer. It starts like this:

With a user base now officially reaching more than 100 million, which includes 60 million paying subscribers, the music streaming platform Spotify is today widely recognized as the solution to problems caused by recent decades of digital disruption within the music and media industries. Spotify resembles Netflix, YouTube, and Apple Music as an epitome of streaming’s digital Zeitgeist that is shaping our future. Industry interviews, trade papers, academic books, and the daily press reiterate numerous versions of this “technological solutionism” (Morozov 2013) in almost as many variations.

This thematic section of Culture Unbound is broadly concerned with the music service Spotify, and novel ways to situate and do academic research around streaming media. Approached through various forms of digital methods, Spotify serves as the object of study. The four articles presented here—three full length research articles and a shorter reflection—emanates from the cross-disciplinary research project “Streaming Heritage: Following Files in Digital Music Distribution”. It was initially conceived at the National Library of Sweden (hence the heritage connection), but the project has predominantly been located at the Umeå University’s digital humanities hub, Humlab, where the research group has continuously worked with the lab’s programmers. The project involves four researchers and one PhD student and is funded by the Swedish Research Council between 2014 and 2018.

Spotify & forskning

  • 6 oktober 2017
  • Dela

Idag har Computer Sweden publicerat en artikel om det pågående ärende som vi forskare i projektet “Strömmande kulturarv” haft att göra med visavi Vetenskapsrådet och Spotify: Spotify försökte stoppa svenskt forskningsprojekt – ”hotar fri forskning”. Jag uttalar mig kort i artikeln, och igår publicerade också min medarbetare Rasmus Fleischer en mycket informativ bloggpost om ärendet: Hur Spotify försökte stoppa oberoende forskning – förgäves. Journalister har därefter hört av sig, men personligen önskar jag inte uttala mig mer i denna fråga. Det är visserligen synnerligen bekymmersamt när stora företag inte bara kontrollerar samtidens informations- och dataströmmar, utan även begränsar möjligheterna för forskare (eller journalister) att undersöka dem – men jag ser ingen anledning att kommentera frågan ytterligare. Den intresserade hänvisar jag istället till våra kommande forskningspublikationer.

Om Big Data i Bildningspodden

  • 4 oktober 2017
  • Dela

I förra veckan pratade jag Big Data i Magnus Bremmers utmärkta Bildningspodden med Nina Wormbs (och även Cecilia Lindhé och Johan Magnusson). Poddpuffen ger en antydan om innehållet: “Varje dag bidrar våra vardagliga vanor till att spä på ett informationsöverflöd som saknar motstycke i världshistorien. Det brukar kallas big data, de enorma datamängder som vi dagligen skapar och som i allt större utsträckning påverkar vår tillvaro.” Podden ligger nu online för genomlyssning.

Inför bokmässan 2017

  • 20 september 2017
  • Dela

Nästa vecka är det dags för bokmässa i Göteborg. Jag tillhör inte dem som anser att den ska undvikas. Tvärtom. Jag kommer att delta i ett flertal samtal. Under fredagen ska jag prata “big data” med Nina Wormbs till ett kommande avsnitt av Bildningspodden. Och på torsdagen deltar jag i seminariet, Shakespeare i digitala bildningsideal. Under lördagen deltar jag till sist i två kortare samtal som nog bägge kommer att kretsa kring digital bildning, Plats för bildning – på nätet? och Gutenberg och Google – om hur nya media omformar våra liv. Som vanligt ser jag fram emot en stimulerande bokmässa.

The Routledge Companion to Cultural History

  • 15 augusti 2017
  • Dela

I am currently writing an article for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Cultural History, edited by Alessandro Arcangeli, Jörg Rogge and Hannu Salmi, which will be published during 2018. My chapter will revolve around “media and mediatisation” during the 19th century (predominantly). I have just started working with my chapter – and the introduction currently reads as follows:

“There are no realities any more, there is only apparatus”, lamented the Austrian cultural historian Egon Friedell in the early 1930s. Writing a cultural history during the interwar period, media modernity finally seemed to have caught up with him and broken the spell and disenchantment of all previous ages—the Entzauberung der Welt as famously diagnosed by Max Weber—whereby traditional society and culture was replaced by secularisation, cultural rationalisation and modernised bureaucracy. For Friedell, however, even reality itself gave the impression to disintegrate into a mediated dimness, with film and radio as the main perpetrators for blurring cultural hierarchies between high and low. “As long as the cinema was dumb, it had other than film possibilities: namely, spiritual ones. But the sound-film has unmasked it, and the fact is patent to all eyes and ears that we are dealing with a brutish dead machine. The bioscope kills the human gesture only, but the sound-film the human voice as well. Radio does the same. At the same time it frees us from the obligation to concentrate, and it is now possible to enjoy Mozart and sauerkraut, the Sunday sermon and bridge.”

This dreadful and mediated “world of automata” appeared in the epilogue—ultimately entitled, “the collapse of reality”—at the very end of Friedell’s majestic, three volume Cultural History of the Modern Age (1927-31), a publication which became a huge commercial success, especially in the German speaking world, but which was also translated in numerous other languages. Spanning some 600 years, “from the Black Death to the World War”, and with the main focus put firmly on ‘great men’ and their achievements in art, science and culture, Friedell’s account of cultural history has been described as personal and even anecdotal. Yet, his account is also playful and witty—a present blogger designates the book as “obscenely readable”. With his somewhat odd background (for a cultural historian) as a cabaret performer and actor, Friedell simply knew how to please an audience.

However, given his personal experience of ‘low culture’ and the ways in which various form of mass media increasingly seemed to alter reality at the time of his writing around 1930, it remains surprising how murky Friedell’s account of modern media appeared in his cultural historical overview—that is to say, if media were mentioned at all. Friedell did state that the “high-speed printing press” was the most important machine introduced during the early 19th century, and he did devote a few sentences to “illustrated journals”, and yes, his account of the 1840s firmly described the “characteristic inventions of the age” as being “telegraphy and photography”. But apart from these brief notations, Friedell was not particularly interested in cultural historical media accounts, reports or descriptions, and consequently did not write about them (until in his epilogue). Media historiographically this remains somewhat peculiar since Friedell had previously published on the ways in which perception and representation around 1900 had been transformed via the medium of film. In 1912 he had, for example, stated that films are “short, quick, at the same time coded, and [the medium] does not stop for anything. … This is quite fitting for our time, which is a time of extracts.” Taken from his essay, “Prolog vor dem Film” these remarks (and others) in many ways forebodes cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s canonised account of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction (written during the 1930s). Yet, if Benjamin took a positive stance towards mass media, especially film—Friedell’s characterisation was way more gloomy. Still, given the accounts in the epilogue of Cultural History of the Modern Age, Friedell did seem to realise—and to some extent even anticipate—mass media’s increased importance. His final remarks were contemporary, but they could also have been historicised if he would had payed more attention to the cultural history of media.

Departing from Friedell’s paradoxical acknowledgement of both a “world of automata” and his lack of interest in situating media within cultural history, this chapter will provide an overview of the cultural impact of different media forms and technologies from the early 19th century until the advent of sound film and radio (that is, approximately at the time when Friedell was completing his cultural history). Taking my cue from novel ways to perform cultural historical media research and equipped with a media archaeological perspective—which seeks to avoid telling mono-media histories of technologies from past to present—I will pay attention to both new media as well as residual media formats (as the panorama and the stereoscope), while trying to pin down how these were publicly perceived, usually at the intersection between commercial attractions and instructive entertainment. The chapter will also discuss different historiographical ways to understand the cultural history of media, as for example theories of increased mediatisation. In general, the chapter will focus broader media systems—rather than particular media forms as the daily press—and especially pay attention to hybrid forms of media culture and various forms of intermediality, and how these altered over a longer period of time. If the technical reproduction of texts and images, sounds and moving images via fast printing presses, photography and phonographic recordings as well as later cinematography, were almost unimaginable in the early 1800s, a hundred years later they were all “treated as a matter of course”. How did this happen, what changes occured and which consequences did it have for the ways in which ordinary people perceived both themselves and their world?

Kort intervju om musiktjänster i GP

Häromdagen ringde journalisten Mathilda Olausson från TT – och vi hade ett längre samtal om strömmande medietjänster. Det har nu resulterat i en kortare intervju som publicerats i GP: “Så överlever musiktjänsterna trots förluster“. “Musikströmningsföretagen går med förlust – men trots det lever de kvar, år efter år.” Varför det är så försöker jag besvara.