Exporting the Nordic children’s ’68: the global publishing scandal of The Little Red Schoolbook

The Little Red Schoolbook (1969) was one of the most well-travelled media products for children from ’68 aimed at children, and it was certainly the most notorious. Over the course of a few years (1970–2) it was translated and published in Belgium, Finland, France, Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, it also circulated freely in Austria and Luxembourg, and reached beyond Europe to countries including Australia, Japan and Mexico. It led to an obscenity trial in Great Britain, nearly toppled the Australian government, and caused a global publishing scandal. This essay therefore looks at the Scandinavian children’s ’68 in its international context, via a transnational, comparative analysis of the reception of the LRSB, in order to examine how ‘68 counterculture and ideas of childhood clashed and converged in the West around 1970. It asks: what can the publishing history of the LRSB tell us about the distinctive features of children’s media in Scandinavia at this time

Exploring data provenance in handwritten text recognition infrastructure:Sharing and reusing ground truth data, referencing models, and acknowledging contributions. Starting the conversation on how we could get it done

This paper discusses best practices for sharing and reusing Ground Truth in Handwritten Text Recognition infrastructures, and ways to reference and acknowledge contributions to the creation and enrichment of data within these Machine Learning systems. We discuss how one can publish Ground Truth data in a repository and, subsequently, inform others. Furthermore, we suggest appropriate citation methods for HTR data, models, and contributions made by volunteers. Moreover, when using digitised sources (digital facsimiles), it becomes increasingly important to distinguish between the physical object and the digital collection. These topics all relate to the proper acknowledgement of labour put into digitising, transcribing, and sharing Ground Truth HTR data. This also points to broader issues surrounding the use of Machine Learning in archival and library contexts, and how the community should begin toacknowledge and record both contributions and data provenance

Exploring Data Provenance in Handwritten Text Recognition Infrastructure: Sharing and Reusing Ground Truth Data, Referencing Models, and Acknowledging Contributions. Starting the Conversation on How We Could Get It Done

This paper discusses best practices for sharing and reusing Ground Truth in Handwritten Text Recognition infrastructures, as well as ways to reference and acknowledge contributions to the creation and enrichment of data within these systems. We discuss how one can place Ground Truth data in a repository and, subsequently, inform others through HTR-United. Furthermore, we want to suggest appropriate citation methods for ATR data, models, and contributions made by volunteers. Moreover, when using digitised sources (digital facsimiles), it becomes increasingly important to distinguish between the physical object and the digital collection. These topics all relate to the proper acknowledgement of labour put into digitising, transcribing, and sharing Ground Truth HTR data. This also points to broader issues surrounding the use of machine learning in archival and library contexts, and how the community should begin to acknowledge and record both contributions and data provenance

Why Batman was Bad: A Scandinavian debate about children’s consumption of comics and literature in the 1950s

This article contains an analysis of public debates about children’s consumption of comics in Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) in the mid 1950s. With this analysis I aim to contribute to the understanding of how adult public 'consumption politics' regarding children’s consumption of cultural products has been articulated at a specific time and place. By historicising adult debates about children’s consumption of cultural products (e.g. films, comics, books) from a cultural history perspective, I attempt to make the arguments of the 1950s debates appear coherent and logical, rather than old-fashioned and disproportionate, as they seem to us in a modern context. "We do not want our children to be raised in the name of violence, race-hatred, gangsters and pin-ups as it is the case in the inappropriate comics of mostly American origin. We want our children to be reared as good, harmonic and optimistic human beings with respect for their fellow humans, tolerant and able to live their lives in peace. Inappropriate comics encourage the first and hinder the last." This quotation is from an open letter to the Swedish government, written at a public meeting in Malmö May 13th 1954, organised by the Malmö Peace Committee and Swedish Women’s Left Union (the letter was published in the Swedish newspaper Ny Dag, 13 May 1954). The letter was published on behalf of the couple of hundred parents who had attended the meeting hoping to encourage the government to stop importing American comics into Sweden. Today it can seem ridiculous that Swedish parents, as well as the vast majority of other Scandinavian adults in the 1950s, assumed that the consumption of comics such as Superman, Batman and The Phantom would hinder children from growing up as good human beings. Nowadays toys, films, comics and many other products featuring these almost 'classic' American superheroes have become a natural part of Western childhood, and no Scandinavian politician, teacher or librarian would argue that the consumption of these comics could be the ruin of democracy as many did in the 1950s. So how can we understand the consumption politics that dominated the Scandinavian public fifty/sixty years ago ('politics' here means a set of notions shared by a specific interpretive community, see below)?2 What were the premises that created a fertile ground for the consumption politics that deemed comics an inappropriate cultural product for children in 1950s Scandinavia? This article contains an analysis of public debates about children’s consumption of comics in Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) in the mid 1950s. With this analysis I aim to contribute to the understanding of how adult public "consumption politics" regarding children’s consumption of cultural products has been articulated at a specific time and place. By historicising adult debates about children’s consumption of cultural products (e.g. films, comics, books) from a cultural history perspective, I attempt to make arguments that could otherwise seem old-fashioned and disproportionate, appear logical and coherent from the point of view of the 1950s debaters

Scandinavian children’s television in the 1970s: an institutionalisation of ‘68’?

In my paper I investigate how the Scandinavian broadcasting corporations’ children and youth departments were influenced by the changes in norms for children’s media which happened around “68”. My analysis is influenced by new work on Scandinavian “68”, which has shown that institutions in the region were very receptive towards the ideas held by rebelling youth. I look at how radical ideas about children’s media culture made their way in to the well-established broadcasting institutions and what expression they found when negotiated in policy papers and concrete programs. The analysis is made in three steps. First I scrutinize the Scandinavian “68” historiography to find out which ideas that has been deemed prominent within the regions youth rebellion and how these can be operationalized for an analysis of children’s television. Secondly, I analyze one of the major events in Scandinavian “68” regarding children’s media: the publication of Gunilla Ambjörnsson’s Trash Culture for Children and the symposium at Hässleby Castle in 1969, which the Nordic Council initiated because of all the big debate the book caused. Thirdly, I investigate how the main points from the book and the subsequent symposium made their way into the children and youth departments of the national broadcasters in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, as well as the shared policies and programs made together by these departments within the Nordic broadcasting union, Nordvision

Archives, Mismatches, Hacks! Overcoming Archival Boundaries in Transnational Research

In this article, I use my experiences in writing about the transnational history of Cursive to point toward ways forward for researchers interested in investigating entangled European broadcasting histories. I will point to places where I found European interconnections in journals, committees, and festivals and consider what the availability of these published and unpublished sources has meant for my inquiries. I will also explain how I used a specific content-management software (Tropy) to ‘hack’ and go beyond the national boundaries encoded in the archival collections I used. Finally, I suggest that perhaps it is not audiovisual material broadcasting archives first and foremost need to make available in digital formats if we want to further boundary-crossing television history; instead, I believe that the possibility of sharing self-digitized printed material should be a particular focus in the future