This article examines the factors that enabled French merchants to enter the Spanish Indies markets during the 1620s, particularly in the period betwen the Peace of Monzón (1627) and the outbreak of the Franco-Spanish War (1635). It highlights how the French nation of Seville received unprecedented support from the Crown to develop their marginal enterprises in the Carrera de Indias. Royal patronage played a significant role in integrating—or exluding—wealthy merchant communities from the Spanish Atlantic trading system, therby expanding their networks for direct exchanges with the Americas. The study reconstructs French commercial connections within the Spanish Atlantic trade, contextualized alongside Flemish and Italian networks already operating in New Spain. These three nations dominated much of the cargo legally shipped to and from the viceroyalty in the 1620s and 1630s. The analysis details French business interactions with “native” and “foreign” merchants, their resilience following the economic reprisal of 1635, and observations on the reconfiguration of foreign trading networks alongthe New Spain axis during the Spanish Empire’s economic and political crises of the 1640s.

El artículo examina los factores que facilitaron la entrada de los comerciantes franceses en la Carrera de Indias y en los mercados americanos durante la década de 1620, en particular desde la firma de la Paz de Monzón (1627) y el inicio dela Guerra Franco-Española (1635). Destaca el apoyo sin precedentes que recibió la nación francesa de Sevilla por parte de la Corona para desarrollar sus negocios, hasta entonces marginales, en la Carrera de Indias. El patrocinio real contribuyó significativamente a la integración –o exclusión– de las comunidades mercantiles extranjeras en el sistema comercial atlántico español, facilitando la ampliación de sus redes para el intercambio directo con América. El estudio reconstruye las conexiones francesas dentro del comercio atlántico español, contextualizadas junto con las redes flamencas e italianas que operaban en Nueva España. Estas tres naciones controlaban gran parte de la carga que se enviaba legalmente hacia y desde el virreinato en las décadas de 1620 y 1630. El análisis detalla las interacciones comerciales francesas con mercaderes “naturales” y “extranjeros”, su resiliencia tras la represalia general de 1635 y algunas observaciones sobre la reconfiguración de las redes comerciales extranjeras en el eje novohispano durante la crisis económica y política de la monarquía en la década de 1640.

The paper investigates the fragmented landscape of cultural event information in Sweden, focusing on Småland. It aims to assess the potential for a centralized, user-friendly digital platform to enhance discoverability, accessibility, and engagement across cultural audiences and providers.The study combines a review of 82 regional and international cultural event information platforms (CEIPs) with two online surveys conducted in 2023 (n=34) and 2024 (n=23). Survey participants included cultural professionals from regional and municipal organizations in Småland.Municipal CEIPs often lack advanced filtering, multilingual support, and personalization features. Select international platforms demonstrate more sophisticated functionality. Survey data reveal strong interest in a unified platform, with emphasis on integration of information on events, inclusivity, and usability. Key barriers include administrative burden, and long-term maintenance concerns.Results inform the development of a flexible, metadata-rich CEIP prototype aligned with municipal infrastructure and user needs. Recommendations highlight actionable features for developers, municipalities, and cultural institutions.A well-designed platform can improve cultural participation, especially for underserved groups such as newcomers, non-native speakers, and digitally excluded audiences, contributing to greater cultural equity and accessibility. Preserved data on cultural events over time can serve as a basis for planning future cultural policies.This study offers one of the first regional assessments of CEIPs in Sweden, combining platform analysis with stakeholder insight. It identifies best practices across metadata design and interface functionality.

Elin Wägner was a Swedish journalist and writer as well as a suffragette, a feminist, an advocator for peace, and an early eco-critic. She was also one of the few screenwriters who managed to make the transition from silent to sound film. While she is a canonized figure in Swedish literary history, her name remains largely absent from film history, even though she worked in the Swedish film industry for decades. Her film work is glossed over by her biographers although she collaborated with prominent filmmakers, including Anna Hofman-Uddgren who was long regarded as Sweden’s first female director before Ebba Lindkvist got that credit. Just like Selma Lagerlöf, Wägner showed an early interest in the new medium of film, and her work in the film industry provided her with additional income.

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.

Introduction. This paper explores a challenge for any novel digital intervention: the hesitancy or reluctance among the designated user group.Purpose.The overall purpose is to better understand the hesitant reception of digital innovations through a specific case study. The aim is to further our understanding of resistance towards digital innovation as well as reflect upon the pro-innovation bias of digital development projects.Method. Multiple sources were combined: data collected within the case project and conducted document analysis of project documentation.Results.Labor and maintenance were the main reasons behind stakeholder hesitancy, as well as concerns regarding the hosting, funding, and local relevance of the proposed innovation. Conclusion. The assumption that digitization is inherently beneficial shaped the direction of the case project. Yet ongoing cultural changes and current adaptations must be understood to ensure a new digital solution is actually needed. As researchers we must pay enough attention to relevant local conditions by critically engaging with the innovation process of the project itself. This requires looking pass the pro-innovation bias.  

In the past few years, a new networked public has emerged in Sweden, bringing together individuals from a conservative Christian background who have left faith and/or religious communities. Podcasts on religious deconstruction have played a crucial role in the formation of this network. This study is the first to explore the emerging phenomenon of religious deconstruction podcasts in Sweden. Specifically, the article focuses on the podcast Exvangeliet and examines deconstruction as a communicative project (Linell, 2011a, 2011b). The study aims to gain insight and a critical perspective on these podcast conversations’ underlying patterns, norms, and expectations. Three main organization sequences within the deconstructive conversation are identified: the personal narrative, joint processing, and joint reflection. The conversations are highly collaborative, emphasizing cooperation rather than competition, and lack significant internal conflict. Instead, any conflict exists focuses on the external context, encompassing both the church and the secular majority society.

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.