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