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The digitalisation of cultural heritage creates expectations for improved research methods and more diverse and inclusive memory institutions. However, it is difficult to take advantage of the opportunities the quantification might give owing to deficient and inadequate metadata. The diversity of standards and wilfulness in different historical archive practices creates problems when aggregating data from various sources. The ambition to create more diverse and inclusive memory institutions, compensating for the historical lack of justice, also creates the risk of excluding important contexts from the digital collections. To develop research methods that take this archival wilfulness into account, in this study I have used speculative design to explore images from Europeana, the digital archive that aggregates data from memory institutions all over Europe. Instead of seeing this archive as something lacking in terms of shared standards and inclusive vocabularies, I suggest we see Europeana as a queer collection of wilful archival practices, by showing the desires and imaginations represented in the archival context. By contrasting the visual content of an image with the metadata that describes the image, the norms and desires in the archival practice come into focus, as the metadata points out what at the time was considered interesting about an image, and the reason the photograph was taken. Images described as 'Swedes', for example, rarely show pictures of Swedes in Sweden. Swedes are described as Swedes when they are outside Sweden. It is the exotic and foreign that are categorised. Most importantly, the person who controls the camera is not in the picture, but the choice of perspective and the metadata description of the image tell us something about the photographer's and archivist's will and desires. By visually reversing the perspective and making visible both norms and deviations, I show how one can approach this digital heritage with a methodology of feminist wonder.

The Collective Memory-Work method carries strong democratic norms regarding equality, ownership and deliberation where emancipation is enabled through collective work and by questioning hierarchies between researcher and researched. Another norm in the Collective Memory-Work method is the scientific norm of creating distance using language as a means to separate the imaginary from the subject. However, these ideas might cause problems when applied in real situations where ownership and inequality are important and meaning-making features, and distance is a way to create legitimacy and demonstrate power rather than enable shared ownership. As a means to explore these issues and develop the Collective Memory-Work further, this article compares the method with approaches within western higher arts education and research, as there are some interesting similarities. In light of experiences from a research project at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, various possibilities and problems with Collective Memory-Work are addressed regarding issues such as ownership, trust, motivation, and norms of distance and equality.

How can political participatory processes online be understood in the dynamic, conflicted and highly mediated situations of contemporary society? What does democracy mean in a scenario where inequality and difference are the norms, and where people tend to abandon situations in which they and their interests are not recognized? How can we accommodate differences rather than consensus in a scenario where multiple networks of people are the starting point rather than a single community? In this thesis, these questions are explored through an iterative process in two studies that have used or resulted in three prototypes and one art exhibition. The first study is of communication practices in a global interest community, which resulted in two prototypes: Actory, a groupware that takes differences rather than equality as the starting point for a collaborative tool, and The Affect Machine, a social network where differences are used as a relational capital. The second study is of communication practices in a local commonality where the art exhibition Performing the Common created a public space and involved participants. This resulted in Njaru, a collaborative tool with integrated decision support and visualization of representativeness. In summary, these works depart from the notion of the importance of belonging for e-participation, where the individual can be seen as a participant in several performative states, more or less interconnected trans-local publics. Here the individuals' participation in the local public sphere compete with their participation in other communities, and affect the conditions for local democracy. This thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of these processes, and discusses how differences in democratic participation can be managed with the help of ICT. ; Hur kan politiskt deltagande på Internet förstås, i de dynamiska, konfliktfyllda och medierade situationerna i dagens samhälle? Vad innebär demokrati i ett scenario där ojämlikhet och skillnad är normen och där människor tenderar att överge situationer där de själva och deras intressen inte erkänns? Hur kan vi hantera skillnader snarare än konsensus i ett scenario där flera nätverk av människor är utgångspunkten i stället för en enda gemenskap? I denna avhandling har dessa frågor utforskas genom en iterativ process i två studier som har använt eller resulterat i tre prototyper och en konstutställning. Den första studien gäller kommunikationen i en global intressegemenskap vilket resulterade i två prototyper: Actory, som tar olikheter snarare än jämlikhet som utgångspunkt för ett samarbetsverktyg, och The Affect Machine, ett socialt nätverk där olikheter används som ett relationskapital. Den andra studien gäller kommunikationen i en lokal gemenskap där konstutställningen Föreställningar om det gemensamma skapat ett offentligt rum och engagerade deltagare. Resultatet resulterade bland annat i Njaru, ett samarbetsverktyg med integrerat beslutsstöd och visualisering av graden av representativitet i processen. Sammanfattningsvis utgår dessa arbeten från en idé om vikten av tillhörighet för e-deltagande, där individen kan ses som en deltagare i flera performativa stater, mer eller mindre sammankopplade translokala målgrupper. Här konkurrerar individernas deltagande i den lokala offentligheten med deras deltagande i andra samhällen, och påverkar förutsättningarna för lokal demokrati. Denna avhandling bidrar till en djupare förståelse av dessa processer, och diskuterar hur skillnaderna i demokratiskt deltagande kan hanteras med hjälp av IKT. ; At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Submitted. Paper 8: Submitted.

The micro-financing of artists offers new possibilities for people outside the economic and cultural elite to become patrons of the arts. One might term it a more democratic base for the artistic activity and its varied discursive practices. However, it is not just the economy of art that focuses on people with the particular skills to make things that get called "˜art.' Promoting a personal brand in the form of taste, education and social relations is also central to every career in an insecure and flexible labor market, and not only in the creative sector. Accordingly, the crowd funding of humanity, rather than of production of commodities, is a possible and reasonable scenario for a future social system, where people are deeply interconnected in collaborative networks.In order to examine what such a system might look like in practice, I have in my project The Affect Machine formulated a market place for social relations. Here I show how the principles for a capitalist institution like a corporation can be combined with those of a digital social network, and thus point to a form of merger between the private and public sector. In this scenario for a future social system, we may approach something resembling Marx's vision of a communist society.

Abstract
At the core of museum practice is the notion of diversity. However, as this analysis of different types of metadata production shows, contradictory ideas and ideals pervade both metadata production among information specialists (i.e. archivists, metadata managers, curators working in the heritage institutions), and the systems for, and practices of, participatory metadata production. While the discourse on metadata standards is permeated by ideas of objectivity and interoperability the field is, in practice, far from coherent, being marked by a great variety as regards templates, formats and vocabularies. Conversely, the discourse on digital participation in the cultural heritage is permeated with notions of diversity, as means to increase democracy and support variety. In practice, however, the available crowdsourcing platforms are often formulaic offering few possibilities for the crowd to add individual interpretations and their own agenda. This analysis of the practice of producing descriptive metadata reveals the complex, multifaceted implications of notions of diversity for the cultural heritage. Diversity, meaning great variety, is then not solely a positive end in itself but can in fact hinder the distribution and linkability of information and thereby the creation and building of new knowledge. Likewise, participatory activities where heritage institutions reach out to the crowd do not automatically generate diversity as there is no direct correlation between the magnitude of the group and variability. To understand this complexity and acknowledge the, sometimes, contradictory demands and effects related to the notion and norms of diversity is at the core of the making and preservation of our cultural heritage.

Decision-making in self-organized information systems such as online collaborative data production systems can be understood as an autonomous system beyond centralized power of nation-states and their various institutions, mediated by social media tools where crowd feedbacks are aggregated in a variety of reputation mechanisms. These more informal sources are however not without problems. Group biases easily appear and assumed credible sources do not necessarily provide more accurate information, in particular when it comes to more complex problems and when a diversity of perspectives or certain expertise is required. To this adds the practical problem that there is a lack of efficient technology design to support equal representation and analysis of representativeness. This article focuses on the representativeness issue and, while providing an overview over principles and some tools for crowd sourced data production, suggests a framework for making patterns of bias in collaborative information production online more transparent.

Purpose
In this paper, the authors address the lack of methodologies and tools that support community and consensus processes in online settings while also acknowledging agonistic conflicts and a diversity of interest communities. The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology and tool support for analysing discursive processes, as well as for creating structural support for better informed deliberative processes.


Design/methodology/approach
This participatory design is based on two case studies of urban planning projects in Swedish municipalities. An ethnographic study of information practises among municipality officials and residents exposed a need for supporting the direct communication with citizens and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as well as democratic processes within groups.


Findings
The authors show how a general participatory methodology on different levels of governance can be supported using a standard type of interface and analytical tools for structured discussions and statistics.


Research limitations/implications
The tool design has not been tested in any larger scale. The tool is at present foremost useful for communicating in participatory contexts. The actor perspective in the methodology used means that the actors, rather than organisations, are highlighted as the owners of specific questions. It also means that a survey or discussion initiated by a government can have competition from other actors using the same instruments or data.


Practical implications
Except for being an analytical tool for analysing participatory attributes and for better understanding of how decisions are formed, the platform also includes tools for more elaborated decision support, as well as support for voting and pro/con argumentation integrated with discussion forum for providing reasonable conditions for a broader more well-structured participation.


Social implications
The actor perspective in the suggested methodology and tool support means that the actors, rather than organisations, are highlighted as the owners of specific questions. It also means that a survey or discussion initiated by a government can have competition from other actors using the same instruments or data.


Originality/value
This platform provides integrated analytical tools and elaborated decision support for individual users, to support democracy from a micro-perspective rather than from a government perspective, and reaches significantly beyond the capacities of similar tools and methods presently available. The traditional dichotomy between the government and the citizens in e-government research is, thus, avoided by developing a tool that takes the individual actor as the starting point rather than an abstract collective.

AbstractTo better understand the interplay between digital activism and feminist infrastructure, this study investigates #MeToo activism in the Swedish construction industry and green industry. Both are industries in transition characterized by a dissonance between formal incentives, that encourage women and others to work in environments previously dominated by white men, and the informal power structures hosting a toxic masculinity. Based on media texts and interviews with key persons from the industries, the article situates #MeToo in a local context and shows how it was embedded in a supportive social, cultural, and technical infrastructure. In both industries, at the time of #MeToo this feminist infrastructure was already in place consisting of: an awareness of the problem of sexual harassment and abuse, knowledge of feminist explanatory models, established feminist online networks, and a supportive feminist culture, which together with widespread digital and feminist literacy became instrumental in the organization of the movement. Social media connected activists and created a critical mass by supporting the uniting of conflicting identity positions around shared differences. The established feminist infrastructure meant that the #MeToo activism, by articulating a widespread affective dissonance, pushed open doors that were already half open and forced them wide. This can explain some of the movement's success in Sweden.

The concept of open government, having been promoted widely in the past 5 years, has promised a broader notion than e-government, as supposed to fundamentally transform governments to become more open and participative and collaborative. Unfortunately, this has not significantly enhanced a set of fundamental problems regarding e-government. One of the problems is that the underlying democratic ideology is rarely clearly expressed. In this paper, we have therefore constructed a framework for the analysis of open government from a democratic perspective, to explore the research foundation of open government and the types of research missing. We have looked closely at the notion of democracy in peer-reviewed journals on open government from 2009 to 2013, focusing on discussions of some fundamental issues regarding democracy and the type of solutions suggested. We have found that despite seemingly good intentions and an extensive rhetoric, there is still an apparent lack of adequate tools in which public deliberation and representation are addressed in any meaningful sense. There are two main important observations herein: (i) the rhetoric in the dominant discourse supports the concept of open government formulated by the Obama administration as transparency, participation, and collaboration, but in practice, the focus is predominantly on transparency and information exchange, while ignoring fundamental democratic issues regarding participation and collaboration, and (ii) the concept of the public is inadequately considered as a homogenous entity rather than a diversified group with different interests, preferences, and abilities.

The concept of open government, having been promoted widely in the past 5 years, has promised a broader notion than e-government, as supposed to fundamentally transform governments to become more open and participative and collaborative. Unfortunately, this has not significantly enhanced a set of fundamental problems regarding e-government. One of the problems is that the underlying democratic ideology is rarely clearly expressed. In this paper, we have therefore constructed a framework for the analysis of open government from a democratic perspective, to explore the research foundation of open government and the types of research missing. We have looked closely at the notion of democracy in peer-reviewed journals on open government from 2009 to 2013, focusing on discussions of some fundamental issues regarding democracy and the type of solutions suggested. We have found that despite seemingly good intentions and an extensive rhetoric, there is still an apparent lack of adequate tools in which public deliberation and representation are addressed in any meaningful sense. There are two main important observations herein: (i) the rhetoric in the dominant discourse supports the concept of open government formulated by the Obama administration as transparency, participation, and collaboration, but in practice, the focus is predominantly on transparency and information exchange, while ignoring fundamental democratic issues regarding participation and collaboration, and (ii) the concept of the public is inadequately considered as a homogenous entity rather than a diversified group with different interests, preferences, and abilities.

We argue that integrated catastrophe models are useful for policy decisions, for which a large degree of uncertainty is a natural ingredient. Recently, much attention has been given to the financial management of natural disasters. This article describes the results of a case study performed in northeastern Hungary where different flood manage ment strategies have been explored and compared using an integrated catastrophe model. The area used for the pilot study is the Palad-Csecsei basin (the Pilot basin) where 4 621 persons live. The Pilot basin is located in the Upper Tisza region. An executable and geographically explicit model has been developed, linking hydrological, geographical, financial, and social data. The outcomes of the policy simulations are represented at different granularity-levels; the individual, the aggregated (entire basin), and the governmental. ; Part of urn:nbn:se:su:diva-525