This study uses digital text analysis, focusing on LDA topic modeling, to conduct a historical investigation of the relationship between the concepts of nature and culture found in the pages of the official magazine of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, The UNESCO Courier, between 1948 and 2020. The relationship between the concepts of nature and culture has historically been at the core of concerns about the environment and sustainability; Courier offers a means of charting a global conversation on these concepts. After presenting the corpus and our methods, the paper documents three approaches to LDA topic modeling that we have tested, through which we seek to make topic modeling useful for the field of conceptual history. Our empirical findings suggest that the concepts of nature and culture have come to be increasingly close over the course of the last six decades, while the stakes of the very distinction between the concepts have changed radically. Our methodological tests support the argument that topic modeling can be a valuable tool for conceptual history, albeit one that must be handled with care.

Based on digital readings of all records from the Swedish parliament1867–2019, we examine how the concept ‘propaganda’ was used in the debates. To track the concept, we have extracted word window co-occurrences, bigrams, and keywords. Research on the history of propaganda in liberal democracies has emphasized that the meaning of the concept was open-ended before WWI. By 1945, it had been contaminated by authoritarian propaganda, and its negative connotations were cemented at least by the 1960s. Our analysis, however, shows that 'propaganda' was used mainly in a negative sense from 1867 to 2019. Nevertheless, it was also possible to use 'propaganda 'in a positive and neutral sense between the 1910s and 1980s. We suggest that a period of deideologization in Sweden post-WWII made it possible to use 'propaganda' as long as the issues were seen as non-controversial. The radicalization in the late-1960s meant that authorities and previously non-controversial issues became contested. To suggest one-directional 'propaganda' in order to implement what politicians had decided was in people's best interest became difficult int his context. In this new communication setting, 'information' was a more flexible term in contexts where ‘propaganda’ had previously been used in a neutral or positive sense.

This paper explores the contexts of the keywords "propaganda", "information" and "upplysning" in the Swedish parliamentary debate protocols, from 1920 to 2019. The digitized protocols have recently been annotated with metadata for speakers’ gender and party affiliation. Based on perspectives developed within conceptual history, we have traced the concepts in the parliamentary debates and used computational methods to cluster the contexts in which they occur. Word windows around the three keywords were compiled into a subcorpus, and topic modelling was used to cluster the contexts. The findings show that the distribution of the topics gets more even over time, partly explained by the spread of the term "information" in various political areas in the mid-20th century. Furthermore, the only distinct topic shared between the three keywords relates to campaigns to limit and prevent the consumption of alcohol, narcotics and tobacco. While a conceptual shift takes place within this topic, from "upplysning" to "information", it is also shown that it was possible to discuss and frame these issues in terms of "propaganda" post-WWII – it even became more common to do so in the 1950s and 1960s.

The workshop Digital Parliamentary Data in Action (DiPaDA 2022) was organised in Uppsala on March 15, 2022, co-located with the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB). These workshop proceedings reflect the aims of the workshop to foster interaction and stimulate conversations between humanities, social sciences, and computational sciences – representing scholars from the Nordic region and beyond that work with digital parliamentary data. The contributions in the proceedings present results of ongoing research on creating and using historical and present parliamentary data to study parliamentary culture, politics, language use, and the media. Moreover, the contributions offer novel perspectives on applying, curating, and representing this key societal data, and discuss the future opportunities and challenges in such research.

The workshop Digital Parliamentary Data in Action (DiPaDA 2022) was organised in Uppsala on March 15, 2022, co-located with the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB). These workshop proceedings reflect the aims of the workshop to foster interaction and stimulate conversations between humanities, social sciences, and computational sciences – representing scholars from the Nordic region and beyond that work with digital parliamentary data. The contributions in the proceedings present results of ongoing research on creating and using historical and present parliamentary data to study parliamentary culture, politics, language use, and the media. Moreover, the contributions offer novel perspectives on applying, curating, and representing this key societal data, and discuss the future opportunities and challenges in such research.

This open access edited volume shines new light on the history of propaganda and persuasion during the Nordic welfare epoch. A common analytical framework is developed that highlights transnational and transmedial perspectives rather than national or monomedial histories. The return of propaganda in contemporary debate underlines the need to historically contextualize the role and function of persuasive communication activities in the Nordic region and beyond. Building on an empirically situated approach, the chapters in this volume break new ground by covering a range of themes, from cultural diplomacy and nation branding to media materiality and information infrastructures. In doing so, the book stresses that the Nordic welfare epoch, with its associated epithet the “Nordic Model”, was built not only on governance, social security and economic productivity, but also on propaganda and persuasion.

The introduction to the edited collection maps the overarching aims of the book, discusses the time frame and the geographical focus, and situates the book in a media historical research tradition on propaganda and persuasion. A key ambition with this volume is to advance a transnational approach to media history, highlighting how actors and institutions, ideas and practices, have been shaped by transnational entanglements within the Nordic region and beyond. Further, the introduction lays out the rationale for focusing on the entanglement of things, ideas and actors rather than media representations, cross-border connections rather than national comparisons, as well as the importance of a broad media concept in the study of propaganda and persuasion. Lastly, the introduction provides a short overview of chapters included in the book.

This chapter studies the exchanges of ideas and experiences related to public information within the Nordic region and beyond. As an empirical case, the analytical focus centres on the Swedish Board of Public Information (Nämnden för samhällsinformation, 1971–1981) and traces the various contacts—through seminars, study visits, conferences, and so on—that the agency initiated and was part of during the 1970s. By examining the archival material through the concepts of epistemic community and circulation of knowledge, the analysis shows how issues of public information attracted various actors—which represented different social sectors (bureaucracy, advertising industry, academia, etc.) and different interests—that met across national borders in attempts to address challenges of communicating societal important information to citizens.

This paper explores what was explicitly defined as ‘political’ duringthe post-war era, from 1945 to 1989, in two Swedish newspapers. Based on allextracted text blocks containing the term ‘political’, two research questions areexamined: How has the use of the term “political” evolved over time? In whichcontexts was the concept inscribed, and how did these change over time? In-spired by conceptual history, the analysis is divided into three parts: an examina-tion of ‘political’ through bigram extractions, contextual explorations using topicmodeling, and a close reading of one particular topic over time, the topic labeled‘women’. The result shows an increased use of the term ‘political’ from the1960s, with more things that were labeled as ‘political’. The analysis reveals thatthe concept was broadened, but not entirely redefined.

This article highlights cultural policy as a governmental proxy to address political matters beyond the cultural domain – here civil health – and the need to problematize and historicize 'arts in health' policies. The article centres on the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare’s collaborations with cultural workers 1970–1975, framed by three contextual developments: politicization of the cultural sector, call for innovative governmental information, and changing character of health information. Theoretically, the article draws from the field of cultural policy research, with an emphasis on historiographical perspectives. The result shows that despite interdependence, the collaborations were an arena where interests clashed. The main conflict lay in what art should seek to change for the better: society or its citizens? However, the conflicts were also due to a mixture of roles: the agency suddenly found itself a patron of the arts, and the cultural workers producers of governmental information.

As the first nation in the world to introduce a freedom of information policy, Sweden has attracted relatively little attention in the historiography of information. This article analyzes conflicting ideas of governmental information in public discussions in Sweden between 1969 and 1973. The purpose is to highlight alternative ideas that challenged the government’s notion of governmental information. Findings show that the main conflict concerned the interpretation of the desired level of citizen participation and the degree of equality between bureaucracy and citizen, which also caused differing opinions of goals and methods related to governmental information.

The Swedish civil defence organizations have a long tradition of balancing their messages to the public through diverse media use. Over the course of the early Cold War, however, the political and technical circumstances of the civil defence organizations changed, rendering old methods from the 1930s obsolete. To keep their relevance, the narratives of the civil defence organizations had to be carefully remodelled in accordance with the current situation, obscuring some facts while stressing others more clearly. By operationalizing the concept of media system, this article examines how the Swedish civil defence organizations used the media, broadly defined, to deal with the two main narratives that their practical work was based upon: urban destruction as war unfolds, and the safety of air-raid shelters. The article shows how these narratives were constructed and connected between various media, but also their changing and dynamic character over time. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, the narrative of urban destruction changed from a concrete to an abstract mediation, while the narrative of sheltered salvation took an opposite direction.

This dissertation is about the formation of governmental information in Sweden during the period 1965 to 1975. During this period information related issues were high up on the political agenda, in Sweden and internationally. I argue that the period is of particular interest in order to understand the impact and development of governmental information in Sweden, even for our time. One overreaching research question has guided this study: What ideas and practices characterized how and why the state disseminated information to the public? The thesis uses four tensions to study the formation of governmental information in Sweden during the late 1960s and early 1970s: (1) information as a solution – information as a problem, (2) dissemination of information – control over information, (3) information through mass communication – information through interpersonal dialogue, and (4) governmental information – commercial information. These tensions draw theoretically from John Durham Peters’ notions of communication.

The thesis uses strands from three research fields: PR-history, cultural histories of media, and digital humanities. The four papers use different theoretical perspectives in order to shed new light on of the formation of governmental information in Sweden. Adding to that, and to theoretically tie the papers together, the thesis presents an overarching network perspective with a special focus on conceptual history as a means to better understand how governmental information was discussed as well as practiced. Different methods are used to study the formation of governmental information. The latter is partly because of the political issue’s porous boundaries and fragmented-oriented character, and partly due to the lack of previous research with a problematizing and historical approach to governmental information in Sweden. The thesis combines qualitative and quantitative methods to study different aspects how the state communicated with the public.

This dissertation presents new findings about the formation of governmental information during the period 1965 to 1975. One regards the different intersections of governmental information. It shows that the production and dissemination of information from agencies to citizens was far from “pure” governmental information, and rather entangled with various actors from industry, academy and civil society. A second finding concerns the language of governmental information. Here, the dissertation shows – through large-scale digital text methods – how the concept of “information” exploded in usages from the 1960s and onwards, and how “information” as a discursive element infiltrated a growing number of political topics from the same period and onwards. A third finding centers on the media of governmental information. One result shows how broadly academics and bureaucrats defined the concept of media in relation to the practice of governmental information. All kinds of media devices, and not only the traditional news media, were considered important for the purpose of disseminating information on large scale to the public. Lastly, this dissertation reveals governmental information as without guaranties. Overall it shows how information from state agencies to citizens was generated through various conflicting tensions that have to be addressed, but without any hope of finding a balance free from communication problems. These problems tend to reoccur in different settings through history, also visible today. This result should however not be regarded as a pessimistic standpoint, rather it calls for modesty in terms of communication in general, and governmental information in particular.

This article presents an alternative perspective regarding the concept of “propaganda” in the historiography of public relations. Recent scholars of public relations have rightly criticized early attempts to write the field’s history as a linear progression, from propaganda to excellence. At the same time, however, these recent scholars have come to accept a linear conceptual change, and that “propaganda” became an impossible term in liberal democratic countries in the 1960s. By using the empirical case of the massive communication efforts initiated by the Swedish Commission on Right-Hand Traffic, which was assigned to implement right-hand traffic in 1967, this article shows that the concept of “propaganda” both occurred frequently and was used in a neutral sense. To deepen the understanding of this alternative perspective, the article both presents how the historical actors conceptualized their work, and describes how the communication work of the Commission was performed.

Swedish health information, conducted by the National Board of Health and Welfare in collaboration with private participants, expanded rapidly in the 1970s. This study examines a controversial bread campaign, which declared that the National Board, in collaboration with the private Bread Institute, wanted citizens to eat six to eight slices of bread every day. Why and how could such a seemingly unholy alliance come about? Contextualizing the collaborations with the industry, with a network governance approach, this article seeks the answers by investigating the organizational conditions behind the various campaigns. Different conflicting dilemmas influenced the campaigns and their outcomes. For example, the desire to maximize the dissemination of information, and at the same time controlling it, as well as the imbedded power dynamics between private and public sector. The result points to a shift from strong to weak interdependence between the government agency and collaborating parties, basically due to the agency's diminishing campaign resources, which opened up for a stronger commercialization of the bread campaign.

Using computational methods, digitized collections and archives can today be scrutinized in their entirety. By distant reading and topic modeling one particular collection – 4500 digitized Swedish Governmental Official Reports (SOU) from 1922 to 1991 – this article gives a new archival perspective of the history of Swedish film politics and policy-making. We examine different probabilistic topics related to film (and media) that the algorithm within the topic modeling software Mallet extracted from the immense text corpora of all these Official Reports. Topic modeling is a computational method to study themes in texts by accentuating words that tend to co-occur and together create different topics. Basically, it is a research tool for the discovery of hidden semantic structures, exploring a collection through the underlying topics that run through it. Hence, our article captures a number of film discourses and trends within the SOU material. In conclusion, we argue that topic modeling should be recognized as a method and research aid for gathering an overview of a major material; as a way to pose new and unforeseen research questions; and as a kind of computational support that makes it possible to apprehend major patterns more or less impossible to detect through a traditional archival investigation.

Folket sa nej i en omröstning, men vänstertrafik ansågs mossigt. Idag är det 50 år sedan den logistiska mardrömmen vändes till en informationssuccé med hjälp av broschyrer, mjölkpaket, frimärken och tv-jippon.

This article investigates how the Swedish information politics emerged in the twentieth century by analysing thousands of Swedish Governmental Official Reports (8000 reports since 1922). By using methods such as topic modelling with LDA/MALLET, the result shows that a governmental information discourse arose in the 1960s, infiltrating a growing number of political interests, and that the content of the discourse has changed over time. ne important conclusion highlights digital text methods as a more inductive way of doing content analysis than is commonly practised in media and communication studies. A machine can find patterns in texts that no single person could read in a lifetime. Furthermore, the quantitative approach can generate results that problematise previous – qualitative – research. Digital and quantitative analysis of a huge corpora does not neglect close reading; on the contrary this study shows the necessity of bridging both methods in order to better understand the results.

The period 1945–1960 was characterized in Swedish history by the rapidacceleration of state-led social reform. As part of this, there was a general feeling that film should be pressed into use for educational purposes. This article examines the activities of two public committees, the Committeefor Public Information (Kommittén för social upplysning, 1946–9) and the Committee for Public Information Films (Kommittén för social upplysningsfilm,1950–9). The two committees’ remit was to produce films that focused on social reform. This begs an important question. How did the use of film affect the official audiovisual information put out by the Swedish state in the period 1945–60? To better understand the conflict between official public information and the rules of the commercial film market, two different logics are considered, both defined by three variables: resources (small versus large), content (objective versus entertainment), andorganization (state/corporativism–private versus the market). The conceptof mediatization is used to understand how official public information was affected by the rules and rationale of the commercial film industry. The results indicate that there was a clear political agenda that drove the committees to make the film content in an attractive way, and the archival research shows how the committees obeyed these directions. Despite the turn in the popularization of film production, the committees took a clear standagainst trying their hand at pure entertainment. Instead, they preferred theideals of the British documentary tradition. The up shot was a compromise between the two logics. As for resources, the state logic was the determining factor here, and the committees never got much money, certainly not compared to the commercial film market. As for their organization, the committees were never able have their own rules and preferences, since the logic of the market was too strong.The analysis shows that state-controlled audiovisual information is best characterized as finding a middle way between the logic of official public information and the logic of the commercial film market. The committees’ momentum slackened in the second half of the 1950s, yet, even so, the results indicate that this should not be interpreted as a lack of faith in the audiovisual form as a force to be reckoned with in public education. Insteadit merely reflects a shift in preference from film to television.

This article examines the film activities of Civilförsvarsstyrelsen, a Swedish state-controlled civil defense authority under the Ministry of the Interior. Studies of the film activities of the Swedish state, especially from the years following 1945 until the breakthrough of television in 1956, are rare. This study captures the period between 1949 and 1952, a time characterized by an increase in welfare reforms, an escalation of the Cold war and the highest attendance rates in Swedish cinema history. It was also the time when Civilförsvarsstyrelsen started to produce films, and did so to a greater extent than at any other period. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding about how the civil defense used and related to the film medium. The investigation shows that the civil defense expressed a positive attitude towards the use of the film medium as a means of reaching a bigger audience. Furthermore, there was great awareness of the medium’s potential as a tool for propaganda and information. But despite the positive attitudes there was also ambiguity towards the medium. For example, the civil defense board wanted to use the films as a means to influence the citizens to embrace the civil defense ideals, but at the same time there existed a general concern in society towards film as a psychological weapon. And despite its popularity, the film medium was never institutionalized and funding was not very generous. The explanation for this ambiguity could be the general uncertainty and lack of understanding of what effects film as a medium had on its audience.