Humlab Showcase

Detta projekt använder kulturfördrag – bilaterala överenskommelser mellan stater som främjar och reglerar samarbete och utbyte inom de livsområden vi kallar kulturella eller intellektuella – som en historisk källa för att utforska kulturbegreppets internationella historia under 1900-talet.

This project uses cultural treaties – bi-lateral agreements among states that promote and regulate cooperation and exchange in the fields of life we call cultural or intellectual – as a historical source with which to explore the international history of the culture concept in the twentieth century.

The project's multimethod approach makes use of methods associated with the digital humanities to examine bilateral cultural agreements from 1919, when such agreements came into frequent use, to 1972, by which time they regulated a fully global network of cultural relations. I approach these treaties through two data sets. Basic information, or “metadata” (countries, date, topic, etc.) for cultural agreements is available through the electronic World Treaty Index. We access the content of these agreements through a large sample of treaty texts from countries across the world, which we have assembled and curated. Through purpose-built digital tools, we use various forms of quantitative analysis to analyze, visualize, and explore these datasets. In parallel, the project explores the historical process by which a certain class of treaties came to be classified as “cultural” in the first place.

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