Tema kulturarv

Abstract

In an explorative manner this article uses a data driven digital history set-up to focus on broad cultural heritage issues in Sweden during the second half of the 20th century. By distant reading and topic modeling a dataset of 3100 Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU) between 1945–89, the article gives a new perspective of how the Swedish state examined and discussed national cultural heritage as well as archival, library and museum (ALM) issues. Topic modeling is a computational method to study themes or discourses in texts by accentuating words that tend to co-occur and together create different topics. Via a computational interrogation of the dataset in a Jupyter Lab-environment a number of heritage topics related to the ALM-sector can be detected. They include the most common words for each heritage topic, but also reveal temporal periodisations when archival, library and museum issues were mostly discussed as well as other societal topics in the dataset that heritage was related to.