"Hammarliknande föremål" eller torshammare? : Skildringen av nordisk mytologi i museitexer med nedslag i tid mellan 1872 - 2024
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using labels, placards, or external texts a museum can deepen the visitors’ understanding of displayed objects. But the question arises, how can a museum work with the mythology surrounding the objects? This thesis looks closely at two museums in Sweden, the Gotland Museum in Visby and the Swedish history museum in Stockholm. It takes a closer look at if and how the museums’ texts have changed over time – specifically between 1872 and 2024 – when dealing with ancient Nordic mythology. The thesis also aims to find and suggest possible correlations between textual changes and social changes, for example the Second World War and its repercussions. To explore these correlations, two theories are applied, the critical discourse analysis and a narrative theory. To be able to witness a possible linguistic change over time, museum exhibitions and publications are analysed using specific discourses such as myth, magic, religion, cult, and paganism. With the help of theoretical works, changes in the two museums’ informative texts are observed, such as how their earlier output explained Thor’s hammer Mjölnir as a “hammer-like decoration” or only gave a few letters-worth of connections to the mythological background in brackets in the late 19th century. Later they explained these myths as paganism and fantasy during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Today’s exhibitions show a linguistic change as to how the museums explained connections to the myths with words such as “could perhaps” or “might be”. These changes over time are suggested to be linked to social change such as the union and dismantling of the union between Norway and Sweden, the Second World War, and the use of motifs by later xenophobic groups, and finally, more recent Neo-Paganism in Sweden and around the world. This is a two years’ master´s thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".