Bauer's History

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...

 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...

 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...