As the growing influence of the radical right turns cultural institutions into political symbols (Harding, 2021), online forums and social media are key venues for antagonistic outbursts directed at public libraries (Carlsson, Hanell & Hansson 2022). Trolling the Library aims to explore radical right digital attacks against public libraries, and is currently piloting different methods to analyse online comments and news items from the website SamNytt. This contribution outlines one intended deliverable of the project: a shareable workflow for the low-code tool KNIME (KoNstanz Information MinEr).

Low-code tools play an important role in making data analysis and visualization accessible to researchers and students with limited experience, or interest, in programming (see De Mauro, Marzoni & Walter, 2021). While low-code tools do introduce closed-box issues, they can still be considered important steppingstones towards computational approaches (Tyrkkö & Ihrmark, submitted). An additional benefit is the shareability of the workflow resulting from designing the method pipeline in tools such as KNIME or Orange. 

The specific workflow resulting from Trolling the Library contains sentiment analysis and topic modeling components. While limited in scope, the discussion of the workflow highlights both the benefits and drawbacks of low-code workflows as potential shareable resources for the digital humanities. This contribution focuses on the ease of use, possible obstacles from an unfamiliar user’s perspective, and the availability of appropriate resources for the platform. 

Works cited:

Carlsson, H., Hanell, F., & Hansson, J. (2022). ”Det känns som att jag bara

sitter och väntar på att det ska explodera”: politisk påverkan på de

kommunala folkbibliotekens verksamhet i sex sydsvenska regioner. Nordic

Journal of Library and Information Studies, 3(1), 26-43.

De Mauro Andrea, Francesco Marzoni & Andrew J. Walter. 2021. Data Analytics Made Easy: Analyze and present data to make informed decisions without writing any code. Packt Publishing

Harding, T. (2021). Culture wars? The (re) politicization of Swedish cultural

policy. Cultural Trends, 1-18.

Tyrkkö, J., & Ihrmark, D. Submitted. Low-code data science tools for linguistics: Swiss army knives or pretty black boxes? In Coats S. and V. Laippala (eds.) March of Data (Language, Data Science and Digital Humanities X). London: Bloomsbury Academic.