Digital Cultures

Digital cultures is a newly established research field at Lund University. The subject includes studies of the digital development of culture and society in the broadest sense. Research is focused on both contemporary and historical issues, with connections to several other research environments at Lund University such as media studies, library and information science, ethnology, visual and intermedial studies. The research environment in digital cultures is multifaceted and under devlopment with a newly appointed professor. Research focus lies both on the societal consequences of digitization, as well as on its impact on cultural, social, aesthetic and historical transformation processes. Sometimes it is said that everything that can be digitized will be digitized. But what are the consequences of such a technology-driven process? In a broad sense, the research subject digital cultures is about analyzing and understanding the development of the digital society (with a long history) and its current and future consequences. The subject’s researchers are engaged in biohacking, connected homes or digital dream houses, game studies, digital media history and much more. Some of the subject’s research projects are situated at the intersection of digital humanities and media studies – in collaboration with the Humanities Lab and the platform DigitalHistory@Lund – others deal with digital technology, social sustainability and human rights. The research field uses a methodologically broad palette, from archival studies and interview and questionnaire studies to digital methods and studies of data flows, carried out in collaboration with developers where applications or software are adapted for research purposes. Research in the subject is also often linked to the bachelor’s program in digital cultures offered at the undergraduate level, a program that includes a number of teachers and researchers at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences.

Research within digital cultures at present involves a number of ongoing projects: Cash – Human rights and social sustainability in the transition to a cashless society (Formas), Connected Homes and Distant Infrastructures - An Ethnological Study of Networked Domestic Technology and Imaginaries of Pervasive Digitalisation (Swedish Research Council), Welfare State Analytics. Text Mining and Modeling Swedish Politics, Media & Culture, 1945–1989 (Swedish Research Council) and Modern Times 1936 (Riksbankens jubileumsfond).