Mats Malm

New Paths to the Past. Literary Cultural Heritage as Source Material for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Literature is a unique historical source: it treats and problematizes societal and individual issues through the stagings of the imagination. Literature – primarily prose fiction, but also drama and poetry – thus constitutes a seminal source material relevant not only to literary and linguistic researchers, but also for many other fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences. For its true potential to be realized, this material needs to be digitized and made available for exploration with advanced tools. Internationally, this potential is actively explored, which means that the Swedish material may constitute the foundation for further innovative international collaborations, including entirely new kinds of theoretical and methodological interdisciplinary development. This project will provide researchers access to a large set of materials, by digitizing the Swedish literary works that were published separately (i.e., not as part of journals and newspapers) during the entire 19th century. This is a century of intense cultural and societal change, and the digitized corpus constitutes a remarkable foundation for the analysis of change and development in a wide number of areas. The whole material will be made available to research on three web sites providing different novel tools for exploration, and in downloadable form. It will also be available for the public, for schools and libraries, making it possible for all to approach literary cultural heritage in new ways.
Grant administrator
Litteraturbanken
Reference number
In19-0176:1
Amount
SEK 10,446,000.00
Funding
RJ Infrastructure for research
Subject
Specific Literatures
Year
2019