Title:	Sociological Perspectives on the Educational Offerings of Folk High Schools 1868-2018
DNr:	LiU-compute-2024-27
Project Type:	LiU Compute
Principal Investigator:	Erik Nylander <erik.nylander@liu.se>
Affiliation:	Linköpings universitet
Duration:	2024-07-12 – 2025-08-01
Classification:	50301
Homepage:	https://liu.se/medarbetare/eriny84
Keywords:

Abstract

The aim of the VR-funded project "The Folk high School as Mirrors of Society" is to utilize annual reports of Swedish folk high schools as heuristic tools for understanding how these schools have presented and legitimized themselves, and to investigate broader societal changes that took place as Sweden modernized (1868-2018). With a history spanning 150 years, Swedish folk high schools have produced substantial printed materials, now gradually converted to a large digital text corpus through digitization. By deploying large-scale text and image analysis on the database we ourselves generate enable us to systematically and comprehensively analyze these collections of text and key features of Nordic popular education tradition. The interdisciplinary group comprising educational researchers, data scientists, and librarians that work on this bring novel perspectives on popular education and help generate open access resources for the wider research community. However, our early efforts to deploy LLMs for annotating the recently digitized archive using NLP techniques require computing power that neither the Linköping University Library nor personal computers can provide. Through this application to LiU-Compute and NAISS, we hope to expand our computational capabilities.