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This chapter explores the possible influences of Sweden, Denmark and Finland on the Environmental Policy of the EU. We focus specifically on the reputation, expertise and role model behaviour of the Nordic EU members and their possibilities to use these factors as cognitive power resources.The chapter discusses several examples where the Nordic EU member states have successfully promoted their national environmental interests within the EU. We also make use of interviews with environmental representatives at the Swedish, Danish and Finnish Permanent Representations to the EU in Brussels, officials from other member states, DG Environment of the Commission and the European Environment Agency. The results indicate that the Nordic EU members have to some extent minimised their quantitative disadvantages, such as small administrations and limited voting powers, by successfully using the cognitive power resources in question within the Environmental Policy of the European Union.

This essay offers a succinct but comprehensive overview of Icelandic cinema from its early 20th-century emergence to the present day. Split into two parts, the first half focusses on filmmaking in Iceland prior to the founding of the Icelandic Film Fund in 1978, which was to establish a continuous local film production for the first time. Prior to that filmmaking in Iceland boiled down to the occasional efforts of local amateurs, albeit often quite skilled ones, and professional filmmakers visiting from abroad. Indeed, the few silent feature films made in the country all stemmed from foreign filmmakers adapting Icelandic literature and taking advantage of its photogenic landscapes. The first Icelandic feature was not made until 1948 and although immensely popular, like those that followed in its wake, the national audience was simply too small to sustain filmmaking without financial support. Although this changed fundamentally with the Icelandic Film Fund, which instigated contemporary Icelandic cinema and the subject of the essay's second half, the Fund's support proved insufficient as the novelty of Icelandic cinema began to wear off at the local box office in the late 1980s. The rescue came from outside sources, in the form of nordic and European film funds, whose support was to transnationalize Icelandic cinema in terms of not only financing and production but also themes and subject material. These changes are most apparent in Icelandic cinema of the 1990s which also began to garner interest at the international film festival circuit. In the first decade of the twenty first century, however, American genre cinema began to replace the European art film as the typical model for Icelandic filmmakers. Hollywood itself also began to show extensive interest in Icelandic landscapes for its runaway productions, as did many other foreign film crews. In this way Icelandic cinema is increasingly characterized by not only national and transnational elements but also international ones.

This article examines Tómas Sæmundsson's travel writings from his tour of Europe in the early nineteenth century. Sæmundsson visited various cities and then wrote his Ferðabók, along with a detailed introduction and several letters written to family and friends. These travel writings are examined to reveal how Sæmundsson express-es himself about the European cities he visited. How does he present these cities to his nineteenth-century Icelandic readers? How does he attempt to explain the role of the city and describe daily life in the cities? What sort of imagery does he employ to stimulate his readers' interest and imagination?As the study demonstrates, Sæmundsson's writings contain various observations on what characterized the cities he visited, what he found fascinating, and what he found repugnant. He was unafraid to pass aesthetic judgement on the different places and neighborhoods and to declare them to be beautiful or ugly. As a result of the article's analysis and systematic exposition of Sæmundsson's evaluations, it becomes evident that the young Icelandic academic had already acquired some basic knowledge of urban planning, and that he was brave enough to envision a possible layout for Iceland's capital city, Reykjavik.

The Icelandic-English parallel corpus MaCoCu-is-en 1.0 was built by crawling the ".is" internet top-level domain in 2021, extending the crawl dynamically to other domains as well. All the crawling process was carried out by the MaCoCu crawler (https://github.com/macocu/MaCoCu-crawler). Websites containing documents in both target languages were identified and processed using the tool Bitextor (https://github.com/bitextor/bitextor). Considerable efforts were devoted into cleaning the extracted text to provide a high-quality parallel corpus. This was achieved by removing boilerplate and near-duplicated paragraphs and documents that are not in one of the targeted languages. Document and segment alignment as implemented in Bitextor were carried out, and BicleanerAI (https://github.com/bitextor/bicleaner-ai) and Bifixer (https://github.com/bitextor/bifixer) were used for fixing, cleaning, and deduplicating the final version of the corpus. While the TXT format consists solely of pairs of source and target segments (one or several sentences), each segment pair in the TMX format is accompanied by the following metadata: - source and target document URL; - quality score as provided by the tool BicleanerAI; - translation direction identification: the source segment in each segment pair was identified by using a probabilistic model; - personal information identification ("biroamer-entities"): segments containing personal information are flagged, so final users of the corpus can decide whether to use these segments; - language variants: the language variant of English (British or American) was identified for every segment pair on document and domain level. Notice and take down: Should you consider that our data contains material that is owned by you and should therefore not be reproduced here, please: (1) Clearly identify yourself, with detailed contact data such as an address, telephone number or email address at which you can be contacted. (2) Clearly identify the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed. (3) Clearly identify the material that is claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient in order to allow us to locate the material. (4) Please write to the contact person for this resource whose email is available in the full item record. We will comply with legitimate requests by removing the affected sources from the next release of the corpus. This action has received funding from the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility 2014-2020 - CEF Telecom, under Grant Agreement No. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2020/2278341. This communication reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.