From November 2017, the mystical anonymous poster ”Q” filled its followers with messages regarding American politics. Q posted on different image boards and as the number of followers grew different web pages were created where canonical Q-posts (usually called ”drops” or Q-drops”) were preserved, numbered, tagged, and interlinked. The QAnons – the movement formed around the messages from Q – were fierce online discussants occupying almost every possible social media platform. The questions are – Will this corpus exist for future researchers? How do we preserve the content of a deplatformed movement? What are the limits of digital preservation of interlinked content created by a community?

The mysticism of the 19th and 20th centuries has often been perceived as a reaction towards the new fast, dense, and modern world. But is it not so that it thrives on the same material foundations, globalism, networks, and mass production of text, that built our contemporary global information society? In this article, thoughts found in the writings of the Swedish mystic and translator Baron Eric Hermelin are analyzed. Hermelin was born into a Swedish noble aristocratic family in 1860. After traveling through the British Empire as a soldier in his youth, he returned to Sweden with books and knowledge. Unfortunately, he spent most of his remaining life incarcerated in the mental hospital St. Lars in the university town of Lund in the south of Sweden. But from the hospital, he released translations of Rumi, Khayyam, and other Persian mystics as well as reflections on Böhme and Swedenborg. The analysis will use Eric Hermelin’s work and focus on the process of creating and delivering the texts of the Persian Sufis to a Swedish audience.

From November 2017 and forwards the mystical anonymous poster ”Q” filled their followers with messages regarding American politics acting like the person behind the Q was someone who had insight into both the intelligence community and the important political surroundings. Q posted on different image boards but as the amount of followers grew different web pages were created where canonical Q-posts (usually called ”drops” or Q-drops”) was preserved, numbered, tagged and interlinked. The QAnons – the movement formed around the messages from Q – were fierce discussants on the Internet occupying almost every possible social media platform. The movement reached it’s peak when the QAnons spearheaded the attack against the Capitol on the 6th of January 2021. During the autumn of 2020 almost all big social media platforms had started to purge QAnons, kickbanning them and thus removing their accounts and created content.

In January 2021 I started to preserve all Q-posts downloading them in raw text format and saving them as individual files and also saving them in picture format. It is a very interesting material, full of dog whistling, echo-chamber-like links to supporters social media and memes whose messages are very internal. Downloading the posts as text has given me a possibility to use different text processing tools to investigate the corpus. It has also given me an insight into what happens with preserved internet content when links suddenly are broken and the movement surrounding the content is banned. How do we preserve the content of a deplatformed movement? What are the limits of digital preservation of interlinked content created by a community?

In Sweden where my research is performed, most if not all schools on all levels use a digital platform to communicate with children and their parents. It could be any type of communication, from personal communication regarding a child to information regarding homework for a class, what you need to bring to the field trip, and so on. In Sweden, having a law regarding compulsory school attendance between the age of 6 and 15, and also having a rather strict law regarding who could access the information regarding, the information transferred through these platforms are both important and under restricted access.

The problem I investigate is when this system meets a child with special needs. Especially if that child and its parents are supported through different services. Having a support family that the child lives with during periods of time or an institution that the child stays at temporarily. Because of the restricted access to the digital platforms they are unavailable within such arrangements, forcing schools to choose other forms of communication – mostly in the form of analog “contact books”. There are also information security issues when communicating information regarding the child's medical needs through digital platforms.

These problems with the use of digital platforms have led to some ad hoc solutions in Uppsala municipality, which is the focus of my investigation. In this poster, I will explain the process of communication and the consequences regarding information security and preservation of archives when a system forces users to use analog communication where digital communication is the norm.

Swedish administrative law includes great possibilities to transparency for the general public. According to The Principle of Public Access to Information all completed documents at a government agency can by default be accessed by the public if not the agency can motivate legal secrecy. Their motives for secrecy must have a foundation in the Public Access and Secrecy Act. This legal tradition is very old and was introduced as early as 1766. During the COVID­19 pandemic (2020 and forwards) the work at governmental agencies have not been easy. Offices have been closed temporarily and contact with thepublic have been limited because of restrictions. The workplace has been moved from the traditional office space to digital environments as employees have been forced to work from home. The Public Health Agency, who have the main responsible to communicate with the public regarding matters of the pandemic, have had many requests for information during this time. In this paper reactions from media and the public regarding The Public Health Agency’s information management is investigated.

Introduction

The social media platform Reddit is a contemporary context where we have an opportunity to identify problems experienced by people regarding different aspects of life. The platform is virtually anonymous which might make users discuss their problems more freely. Reddit is divided in subreddits where different subjects are discussed and the discussions are controlled by creators and moderators. I have identified a quite active subreddit targeted towards recovering addicts of benzodiazepines; r/benzorecovery.

Objectives

• To analyze strategies of recovery in user narrative
• To identify techniques commonly used and the how they are described
• To construct metadata in order to assess how frequent the discussion of a different techniques are.

Methods

Technically, what is done in this study, is adding mark-up metadata to different discussion. A rudimentary form of analysis suitable with a larger digital corpus where content metadata is added (Gilliland Swetland 2000). The metadata is constructed through a hermeneutical method in which the researcher analyses the subreddit.

Results

Answering question like:(Example)

DIY-tapering; different ways to limit drug use by using less.

1) how common are discussion of taperings in relation to other subjects?

2) Is tapering commonly discussed together with other subjects and techniques?

Conclusions

Using a method of categorization and metadata mark-up we could gain a good understanding of the problems among recovering benzodiazepine addicts. We will also have the possibility to identify concepts that addicts themselves discuss and relate these to professional concepts thus creating better possibilities of communication between professionals and clients.

Hur vi än vänder och vrider på oss sitter vi fast i geografin. Inte bara för att den definierar den fysiska verklighet vi har omkring oss, utan även genom vanans makt. Hur ofta byter du resväg till arbetet eller affären? Hur ofta dyker du plötsligt upp på en plats där du aldrig varit förut? Vana och infrastruktur – det raster vi människor placerar över de av naturen givna topografiska förutsättningarna – styr i mångt och mycket var vi kommer befinna oss under livet. Av samhället färdigdragna vägnät, busslinjer och flygtrafiknav har en stark makt att bestämma vad vi kommer se när vi förflyttar oss. Det gäller alla, även Stig Bergling. En plats han fastnade på var Cypern och det var där hans spiongärning inleddes, genom en introduktion till underrättelsetjänstens praktik, och den avslutades även där med ett samtal till SÄPO och en begäran om att få komma hem till Sverige igen. Berglings spionage var komplext och skedde under flera perioder, mot flera stater och med fler än en uppdragsgivare. Det han är mest känd för är dock försäljningen av Fortifikationskoden, ofta benämnd Fo-koden eller Fo-pärmen. Berling kopierade detta register över Sveriges befästningar på sin arbetsplats vid Försvarsstabens Säkerhetsavdelning och sålde den till Sovjetunionen under en period när han var placerad som militärobservatör för FN i Mellanöstern. Priset var 8000 Libanesiska pund vilket då motsvarade 16 000 Svenska kronor. I dagens penningvärde runt 110 000 kronor.

This poster is providing further explanations to the poster bearing the same name. The goal is to analyze the quality of links within the Q-drop canon, in this investigation with focus on the links to the microblog Twitter.com. Links to Twitter were harvested from the Q-drops and assessed individually regarding whether they were still existing or dead. The status of the Twitter-links were connected to a variety of categories. The conclusion being that a large part of the QAnon Ecosystem is damaged and no longer interlinked. Damage that will make it hard to understand the movement in the future. 

The digital era is accelerating and intensifying interventions in living bodies (Markley 1996, p. 4). Pictures and video clips can intervene with our privacy in a way that could chane our world. I will investigate four Swedish Revenge Porn-cases that were brought to court between 2017 and 2018. Revenge Porn is commonly known as non-consensual pornography – pictures or video material of a sexual nature spread without the portrayed persons consent (Dodge 2021). The verdicts will be analyzed from the perspectives of provenance (where do the pictures origin from?) and process (how did they travel before they became a legal matter?).

Bibliography:

Dodge, Alexa (2021) “Trading Nudes Like Hockey Cards: Exploring the Diversity of ‘Revenge Porn’ Cases Responded to in Law’, Social & Legal Studies, Vol 30(3). 

Markley,Robert (1996) “Introduction: History, Theory, and Virtual Reality”, in Markley, Robert Virtual Realities and its Discontents, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

In his article, ‘Discussions in social media regarding the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation’, Rikard Friberg von Sydow, Senior Lecturer in Archival Science, shares his findings regarding the dis-course on the new data protection legislation carried out on social media by groups of professionals before the GDPR entered into force. Analysing the discussions which took place in three Facebook groups of professionals particularly impacted by this new legislation (archivists, IT-professionals and communicators in the public sector), the author concludes that the discussions witness confusion and very varying levels of insight in the new legislation. The difficulties encountered by the groups of professionals studied in understanding the content and the impact of the new legal framework raise even the crucial question of the practicability and efficiency of the European data protection legislation, and furthermore, the question of the respect for the Rule of Law.