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Algorithms, AI and towards a dystopia?

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A few days ago, I attended an interesting seminar with scholars at Linnaeus University, where I am currently employed. The subject was cultural policy and how cultural politics are undergoing transformation, not least due to the ongoing war. Another theme that was explored concerned algorithms and AI, and as I left the seminar I began to reflect on how the world is currently being challenged by the rise of what might be called “everyday algorithms and AI”. Basically, almost all information that citizens encounter on social media today is curated by algorithms. This can, in turn, sometimes lead to dangerous outcomes, such as the material one encounters gradually becoming more and more radical. This happens because algorithms measure both the time users spend engaging with information and how they interact with it. This is hardly surprising, and numerous scholars have warned about this development. With the rise of AI, algorithms have also become an increasingly integral part of everyday...
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Untold histories and historical beliefs that might change

 I started teaching medieval history in 2019. Whilst I have an overall interest in general history, this period was quite new to me and I have since tried to refresh and renew my knowledge on it. Being a historian of the 20th and the 19th centuries social policies, it was quite a leap to teach on crusades and lived religion in 12th century Europe.  As I progress as a teacher, I always find certain aspects of a time period or a social phenomena as more interesting than others. For the past years, this have led to an increased interest in the ”Islamic period” with the height of the caliphate and the moor presence on the Iberian peninsula between 900-1400. I have also come to think a lot of why this period is of particular interest. One aspect is that this was not taught in schools when I was in highschool. It was first at the university I encountered the Islamic period and first as a teacher I seriously engaged with it. The reason for this is quite simple, what is taught in scho...
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What I’ve learned from publishing peer-review

 I have a doctorate in the humanities from a Swedish university. My PhD thesis was therefore a monographs that did not go through the peer review process, other than the thesis defence which in itself can be viewed as a peer-review process on crack. After finishing my PhD I, however, started to try to publish in international journals.  This process have been both exhausting, frustrating and challenging my ideas of writing. It has also helped me to evolve as a researcher in ways I did not think possible some years ago. Whilst I only have only published paper, I have several underway after several attempts to write peer-review which I totally lacked experience of. The first thing that I have come to notice is that it often takes a long time to publish peer review. Periods for upto a year is not unheard of, nor particularly long. This aspect actually came as a surprise for me. A second aspect is also that journals differs in styles and what they expect from a paper. The old ”the...
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Is it cheating to use AI? Or do AI even the field for non-academics?

 In Swedish university sector, a special category of students are often mentioned. These students are called ”first generation academics” or ”students from homes without university traditions”. Universities often brags about being inclusive and having students from all walks of life, but whilst we often attract this group, universities sometimes fail them. By failing them I mean that we often do not have the tool nor the structures to give them the same conditions as their peers from academic homes. Because let’s face it. There exists a different between growing up in a household where studies are encouraged and reading is viewed as worth encouraging.  In my experience as a teacher, with over 3200 hours of teaching, this becomes evident when it comes to writing. Students from non-academic homes sometimes lacks language and the certainty that comes with a sense of belonging in academia. This in turn sometimes lead to less published thesises, and sometimes even to a lower grade....
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Democracy, right wing populism and social media

In a very simplistic way, humankind can be said to have improved public conversation in society through two important inventions. The first dates back to the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg launched the printing press and thereby made it possible to spread ideas rapidly across Western Europe. Gutenberg’s invention also led to increased literacy among the population, often supported by Protestant churches that aimed for people to be able to read (though not necessarily to critically read) Luther’s Catechism . Public conversation, however, also underwent rapid changes when the freedom of the press, radio, and television were introduced. In this paradigm, media was still controlled by groups able to pool resources, making it difficult for the average Joe to take part in public discourse. It was only at the dawn of the 21st century that this became fully possible with the rise of the internet, and in the twilight of the early 2000s this was further expanded through social media. I...
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Trends in historical research - or are we in a normal mode of the current paradigm?

Decades ago, philosopher Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of paradigm change . What Kuhn argued was that science goes through cycles: in some phases, many things change at once, while in others, science is essentially “settling in,” with few major breakthroughs taking place. A colleague of mine asked me a few days ago whether there are any tensions within the discipline of history regarding theory, and when I thought about it, my answer was basically no. During my time as a historian, I remember people talking about the debates of the early 2000s surrounding the rise of postmodern theories. I began studying history in 2011, and at that time gender history was perhaps no longer new but still very much debated. Fifteen years later, it is clear that gender studies and the influence of women’s history made a decisive breakthrough in the late 2000s and are now an integral part of modern historical scholarship. However, I cannot think of a similarly decisive shift in the past ten years. The...
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From the academia to the screen: academic history and the house of guiness

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  To say the least, history is always around us, and this is no less true when it comes to visual media. This autumn, Netflix has launched what I hope will be a blockbuster series in the form of   House of Guinness . The series portrays the life of the famous Irish brewing family and the political conflicts of late 1860s Dublin. History is often used as a kind of projection surface for our own fantasies and ideas about how the past might have been. To recreate history on TV therefore means, to some extent, that we colonize — in this case — 19th-century Ireland with people who think in modern ways. What we see on screen is thus not the past as it actually was, but our contemporary conception of it. As a historian, I love historical series and movies. Even though they never truly portray the past accurately, they still provide entertainment and, to some degree, represent the past as we  want  it to be, rather than how it  actually  was. Another interesting as...
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