This paper investigates how cultural institutions are symbolically and rhetorically mobilized within far-right culture war discourse. Focusing on YouTube, the study examines how public libraries and museums are incorporated into far-right conspiracy narratives. The empirical material consists of 3,549 videos from 11 Swedish far-right YouTube channels, collected via the YouTube API. A subset of eight highly viewed videos, all addressing libraries and museums, was selected for qualitative multimodal analysis. This is complemented by a quantitative topic modelling analysis of the broader video corpus.

Preliminary findings indicate that librarians and museum professionals are portrayed as tools, victims, or occasional as agents within far-right conspiracy myths, such as “the deep state” and “the great replacement.” The contested concept of institutional neutrality is strategically employed to legitimize these narratives. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how cultural institutions are appropriated in far-right media ecosystems to support broader conspiratorial and political agendas.

In Sweden, the growing influence of the far-right has turned cultural institutions into political symbols in an emerging ‘culture war’ (Harding, 2021). Carlsson, Hanell & Hansson (2022) show how digital forums and social media play a significant part in orchestrating the ideologically laden conflicts and confrontations that public cultural institutions are currently facing. Digitally mediated threats from the far-right may obstruct the statutory mission of these institutions to promote democracy, but knowledge about how such threats develop and unfold, as well as the relation between online interactions and offline events (Scrivens, Davies & Frank, 2020), is lacking. The Cultural Institutions and the Culture War (CICuW) project aims at exploring the online discourse surrounding cultural institutions in far-right contexts in order to produce knowledge regarding possible connections between online interactions on the topic of libraries and museums, as well as offline events at these institutions.

The project has previously conducted a pilot study on materials from far-right news sources (Hanell et al. 2025), but is now expanding into materials collected from YouTube (3571 transcribed videos from 11 channels) and the Swedish web forum Flashback’s Culture and Politics sub-forum (6638 posts) from Språkbanken Text (2025). The proposed paper will focus on the overview of the materials which will later be used to identify patterns of discourse for further qualitative analysis. The overview makes use of BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022) to produce clustered topics from the materials while a NLPTown multilingual BERT model (Peirsman, 2020) is used to perform sentiment analysis.

Using these two modes of analysis, the overview is intended to indicate commonly occurring positive and negative topics, as well as showcase platform-specific trends that may indicate broader or narrower discourses surrounding libraries in the materials. This overview is then supplemented by zero-shot classification using KB Labs Megatron BERT model (Sikora, 2023) for initial dynamic scoping of relevant materials. Initial findings indicate that topics involving libraries and museums often position them as arenas for broader political discourses, where the actions of different political parties are framed as setting the agenda for cultural policy. This is in line with previous research on how libraries and cultural institutions figure in the culture war (Usherwood and Usherwood, 2021).

Furthermore, the far-right’s usage of social media platforms and online content creation has previously been indicated as an especially important component of the mainstreaming and dissemination of the ideology (Ekman, 2014; Munn 2020; Sakki & Pettersson 2016). The CICuW project’s overview of far-right content discussing cultural institutions thus become an important addition to our current understanding of how social media is used by the far-right to frame and build opinion on cultural policy, as well as regarding public cultural institutions. While the earlier pilot project conducted on far-right news media indicated some recurring patterns of discourse (Hanell et al. 2025), the expanded scope of the now broadened dataset will allow for further insights into the nature of the broader discourse. In addition, the inclusion of multiple platforms that are used in different registers and predominantly used for different forms of media (articles, forum posts and videos) makes for an important contribution towards the discussion on how far-right ideology proliferates in different environments.  

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. 

Ekman, M. (2014). The dark side of online activism: Swedish right-wing extremist video activism on YouTube. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, 30(56), Article 8967. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v30i56.8967 

Grootendorst, M. (2022). BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05794 

Hanell, F., Carlsson, H., & Ihrmark, D. (2025). Exploring culture war related attacks on public libraries: results from a pilot study on information activities of the far-right. Information Research, 30(CoLIS), 344–365. https://doi.org/10.47989/ir30CoLIS52333 

Harding, T. (2021). Culture wars? The (re)politicization of Swedish cultural policy. Cultural Trends, 1–18. 

Munn, L. (2020). Angry by design: Toxic communication and technical architectures. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7(1), 1–11. 

Peirsman, Y. (2020). nlptown/bert-base-multilingual-uncased-sentiment [Computer software]. Hugging Face. https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/1515 

Sakki, I., & Pettersson, K. (2016). Discursive constructions of otherness in populist radical right political blogs. European Journal of Social Psychology, 46(2), 156–170. 

Sikora, J. (2023). The KBLab Blog: Swedish zero-shot classification model. KBLab. https://kb-labb.github.io/posts/2023-02-12-zero-shot-text-classification/ 

Språkbanken Text. (2025). Flashback. Språkbanken Text. https://doi.org/10.23695/YKK8-7D22 

Usherwood, B., & Usherwood, M. (2021). Culture wars, libraries and the BBC. Library Management, 42(4–5), 291–301. 

Disciplinary literacy refers to the specific literacies required to understand and engage with materials written using the semiotic repertoire unique to a given field (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2017). Traditionally, it bridges language learning and content knowledge, emphasizing modes of communication, such as graphs and charts in the social sciences, that are integral to understanding specific classroom subjects. This proposal extends the concept of disciplinary literacy to include programming as an important literacy for Digital Humanities (DH) education, particularly when integrated with the established framework of computational thinking (Wing, 2006).

Over the past two years, cohorts in the Linnaeus University DH MA program have been introduced to Python scripts in Google Colab as a supplementary component to a first-semester course on digital methods. The course primarily relies on executables with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for assignments in text analysis, network analysis, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Alongside these tools, Python scripts performing similar tasks at a more basic level have been provided within each module. In addition, a similar mode of teaching has been used during the BALADRIA summer schools, with a mixed group of PhD and MA students from different fields and disciplines.

The inclusion of Python scripts is not intended to primarily develop students' practical coding skills, but to foster engagement that builds towards literacy in reading and interpreting code in a similar way to how other introductions to languages are carried out. This foundational literacy aligns with Moje’s 4Es of disciplinary literacy—engaging students in authentic disciplinary practices, eliciting and engineering prior knowledge and experiences, examining the underlying principles and methods, and evaluating their understanding to empower them as actors within the discipline (Moje, 2015). Integration with focus on reading and interpretation can also serve to concretize the decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithm steps suggested by computational thinking by showcasing how they result in working code (Wing, 2006).

By framing coding as disciplinary literacy, this presentation will argue for the deliberate integration of programming into DH education as a semiotic mode for engaging with content knowledge. The effects of such integration are discussed with a basis in student evaluations and instructors' teaching experiences.

Bibliography

Moje, E. B. (2015). Doing and teaching disciplinary literacy with adolescent learners: A social and cultural enterprise. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 254–278. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.254

Shanahan, C., & Shanahan, T. (2017). Disciplinary literacy. In Handbook of Writing Research (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis.

Wing, J. M. (2006). Computational thinking. Communications of the ACM, 49(3), 33–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/1118178.1118215

Textual elements are important features of any map, yet computational identification of words and characters – namely optical character recognition (OCR) - can be challenging given the non-textual features, different textual orientations, overlayed elements, and other complicating aspects of maps. Despite these OCR has been explored for printed maps with typeface text. But little work is currently undertaken applying handwritten text recognition (HTR) on non-printed, handwritten maps. Several openly available HTR tools – such as Transkribus or HTR Flow – are able to capture text from manually written documents, but these tools are usually applied to predominantly textual documents (e.g., letters, manuscripts, diaries). There is little insight into their efficacy regarding cartographic documents.

This on-going project explores the feasibility of current artifical intelligence models for HTR on the historical maps of Danish cartographer Johannes Mejer (1606-1674). Besides learning the capacities of current technologies in this type of media, digitalization of Mejer’s collection can offer insights into a crucial period in Nordic history, preceding the Swedish acquisition of Skåne, which Mejer was the first to chart during this time. Several machine learning applications for HTR – specialized systems such as Transkribus and HTR Flow, as well as general large language models such as GPT5 and Sonnet 4 – are trained and tested. 

After outlining the problem and the methods, including the preparation of AI training/testing material, this presentation reports the findings regarding the performance of currently available machine learning models. Following this, we propose subsequent steps for improved output. We also share preliminary historical insights gleaned from the processing on the Mejer’s works, as well as the overall challenge of applying HTR machine learning for difficult material such as historical maps. In so doing, the project hopes to encourage exploration of machine learning applications with unconventional material with textual elements.

Introduction. This paper reports initial findings from a research project focusing onhow information activities of the far-right promoting ideologically motivatedpressure and threats against cultural institutions develop, spread and unfold, thelogic governing these attacks and how they affect public libraries and librarians.

Method and analysis. The project employs the theoretical framework of practicetheory and a netnographic approach. The paper outlines the project and reports theoutcomes of a pilot study using data-driven digital methods and content analysis toanalyse digital interactions from a Swedish far-right media outlet.

Results. The findings from the pilot study indicate that online information activitiesof the far-right display a view of public libraries as leftist and as potential threats tothe nation, echoing ethnic nationalism and authoritarian views commonlyassociated with the far-right.

Conclusions. Indications that librarians, as civil servants, are increasingly the targetof ideologically driven threats and antagonisms warrant further scholarly attention.The pilot study reflects how quantitative procedures are necessary for the analysisof large amounts of data, but the functionality of the digital methods need to betested and adjusted according to context, and qualitative approaches are necessaryfor a nuanced and contextual understanding.

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. While low-code tools do introduce closedbox issues, they can still be considered important stepping stones toward computational approaches. This chapter draws on two such tools, Octoparse and KNIME (Konstanz Information Miner), to present a workflow from data collection from online sources, through text pre-processing, toward text classification in the context of the ongoing project Cultural Institutions and the Culture War (CICuW) that investigates the democratic implications of the pervasiveness of farright digital discourse. This chapter will introduce web scraping, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis in an accessible way, while also showcasing state-of-the-art approaches to the analysis components through the use of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) models and zero-shot classification. The chapter will take a critical perspective on the described methods by discussing how they contribute to creating methodological closed-boxes and how quantitative techniques can be fruitfully combined with qualitative approaches.

The nature of the character of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1925) has been the focal point of many previous endeavours, indicating him as being a self-insert of the author himself[1], a man void of both personality and agency[2], or even a narrator armed with the infallible concept of hindsight[3]. The centrality of named characters to the narrative is apparent through character names (Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy) being amongst the most common content terms of the novel. However, Nick is curiously absent in terms of being present in any interaction outside of the obviously physical one. Certainly this could have to do with his position as the narrator of the story, although his presence in the situations depicted in the novel makes this unlikely. 

Nick’s first name is only found 24 times throughout the novel and is mainly used at the Buchanans’. The surname, Carraway, appears at a frequency of 10 and is only found in more formal interactions. A stand-out moment in the naming of Nick is found at the speak-easy, when Gatsby introduces Nick to Mr. Wolfsheim using the surname. This poses the central question for the proposed paper: Since Nick is rarely called by his name, regardless of the state of his perceived interpersonal relationship to the character in question, how is he referred to by the other characters? And, how does the reference to him change in the different contexts?

The method of this paper will be based on text mining to extract the characters involved in an interaction, the place of an interaction, and the plain text of whatever dialogue is exchanged. The extracted characters will be used to create an interaction network, indicating parties to an interaction where Nick is referred to in a specific manner. References to the character will then be explored in terms of spatial placement, to see if the manner of reference changes based on where the interaction is taking place. Finally, the manner of reference will be plotted along the progression of the text in order to see if any development can be found at specific points in the novel's progression. 

References:

 [1] Kazin, Alfred, ed. (1951). F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work (1st ed.). New York City: World Publishing Company – via Internet Archive. P. 81

[2]Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1991) [1925]. Bruccoli, Matthew J. (ed.). The Great Gatsby. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40230-1 p. XXVIV, Introduction 

[3] Kelly, D. (1999) The Lyricism of Nick Carraway, Sydney Open Journals. Available at: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/SSE/article/view/540/511 (Accessed: 2024). 

 PurposeMany end users turn to Google Books and social tagging services to identify books of interest. How successful they are will depend on subject indexing applied in these services (among other factors). The study aimed to determine: (1) to what degree are Queerlit books identified as LGBTQ+ books in widely used information services, in particular Google Books, LibraryThing and Goodreads; and, (2) whether metadata in these information services could be considered of value for the Queerlit database and complement its highly extensive and highly specific indexing.

Design/methodology/approachThe study compared keywords (subject index terms, tags) assigned to works of Swedish LGBTQ+ fiction across three commercial services: Google Books, Goodreads and LibraryThing, against the curated database, Queerlit.

FindingsOf the 1320 LGBTQ+ works in Queerlit, only a small portion was found in the three web services: 8.26% on Google Books (n = 109), 13.26% on Goodreads (n = 175), while about half on LibraryThing (55.3%, n = 730). This underrepresentation of Swedish LGBTQ+ works in the three international commercial information services makes them hardly of value to the readers. This is exacerbated by the fact that only a minority of Queerlit books found in the three services are categorised as LGBTQ+. The Queerlit database might benefit from consulting social tagging services when indexing both LGBTQ+ specific and general themes.

Originality/valueNo earlier study compared in a systematic manner four different information retrieval systems and identified challenges as well as potential benefits in relation to finding LGBTQ+ fiction.

In Sweden, the growing influence of the far-right has turned cultural institutions into contested political symbols within an emerging “culture war,” where digital forums and social media play a central role in fueling conflicts and threats that challenge these institutions’ democratic mission ([1], [2]). Despite this, there is limited knowledge about how such digitally mediated threats develop and how online discourse relates to offline events [3]. The Cultural Institutions and the Culture War (CiCuW) project addresses this gap by examining far-right online discourse about libraries and museums to better understand its potential connections to real-world confrontations, building on insights from a prior pilot study of far-right news sources [4]. Presented at HiC 2024, the initial workflow for the pilot consisted of a shareable KNIME workflow which integrated resources via multiple different extensions, and which would go on to form the basis of a chapter in the upcoming Huminfra Handbook on web scraping and text mining.  

However, as the project progressed beyond the initial pilot phase, the workflow changed drastically. Encountering issues  with resource compatibility, expanded demands from the inclusion of new data sources, and the rapid development of Swedish-context resources, the project turned into an exploration of the limitations brought on by the use of low-code tools beyond simply contributing to closed-box methodologies [5]. The proposed project will map the changes in the workflow from the pilot study to the current iteration of the project and contextualize those changes in the developing Swedish digital landscape in order to provide a further reflection on the uses and limitations of low-code tools as an introduction to digital methods for humanists based on previous examples [6].

[1] Harding, T. (2021). Culture wars? The (re)politicization of Swedish cultural policy. Cultural Trends, 30(1), 1–18. 

[2] 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. 

[3] Scrivens, R., Davies, G., & Frank, R. (2020). Measuring the evolution of radical right-wing posting behaviors online. Deviant Behavior, 41(2), 216–232.

[4] Hanell, F., Carlsson, H., & Ihrmark, D. (2025). Exploring culture war related attacks on public libraries: Results from a pilot study on information activities of the far-right. Information Research, 30(CoLIS), 344–365. 

[5] Tyrkkö, J., & Ihrmark, D. (2024). Low-code data science tools for linguistics: Swiss army knives or pretty black boxes? In S. Coats & V. Laippala (Eds.), Linguistics across disciplinary borders: The march of data (pp. 40–66). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350362291.0008 

[6] Ihrmark, D., & Tyrkkö, J. (2023). Learning text analytics without coding? An introduction to KNIME. Education for Information, 39(2), 121–137. https://doi.org/10.3233/EFI-230027