by Lars Aronsson
Project Runeberg was founded in December 1992, now more than 25 years ago. The anniversary passed without any celebration. A handful of volunteers are scanning and uploading out-of-copyright books and magazines and a few dozen help with online proofreading.
The other day, I found that one volunteer had uploaded a Swedish monthly magazine on cinema and film, Biografen, from 1913. In it was a short essay by Ellen Key, a famous Swedish writer of the time, where she pointed out that the labour movement's demand for a regulated 8-hour working day would provide more leisure time and there would be a need to spend it well on educational and "cultural entertainment" (nöjeskultur). She made a reference to a Danish writer, Ludvig Feilberg.
Feilberg (1849-1912) was already known to us, even though we have not digitized any of his books. Our list of Nordic Authors, which we created to keep track of who is out-of-copyright, contained his name, nationality and years of birth and death. It also contained a link to a presentation of his works, provided by a Danish website.
We only add the best links we can find to this list, and as always we keep a history of all the edits we make. This link was added on January 7, 1999. That was two years before Wikipedia was conceived (in 2001), four years before we digitized the Danish biographic dictionary (in 2003), where he is mentioned, five years before we digitized Salmonsen's Danish encyclopedia (in 2004), ten years before Danish Wikipedia's article about him was created (in 2009), eleven years before Swedish Wikipedia's article (in 2010), and 17 years before one of his books were digitized and proofread in Wikisource (in 2016). Indeed, 19 years have passed since that first link for Ludvig Feilberg was added to our list, so now I added the others.
In her essay, published in October 1913, Ellen Key mentioned not only Feilberg's name, but also an article about him in a recent issue of another magazine, Ord och Bild. As it happens, we have digitized that magazine (in 2006), so I could immediately jump to that article and learn more about him. It was published in May 1913 after Feilberg had died in September 1912.
Apparently Ellen Key had access to both magazines, perhaps at Stockholm's public library. That privilege was only available to a well-educated urban elite at the time, when the majority of Sweden's population lived in the countryside and had only 7 years of schooling (and worked longer days than eight hours).
Today, regardless of schooling, background or place of residence, almost everybody who can read Swedish can also access the Internet and now have access to both magazines and to Wikipedia within seconds. We who live in 2018 are the privileged ones, not only compared to 1913, but also compared to 2013 or 2003, when the Internet contained so much less information than today.
However, such stories as I have told here of recent discovery of
older knowledge, are quite rare. Millions spend their days on
so-called social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, ...) sharing
photos of their cats or rumours about recent political events. It
seems that fewer take the chance to discover history, now that they
can. Maybe they don't realize how privileged they are to live in this
time? This puts in jeopardy the foundation of maturing digitization
projects such as ours. For whom are we digitizing? Will anybody read
what we scan and proofread and learn from it? Perhaps our audience
went away while we were busy? Perhaps they are less interested in
educational and cultural entertainment of the kind that Ellen Key
wanted to promote? We should have a lot to learn from her.
