The Center for Grundtvig Studies examines and analyses Grundtvig and his time. Below, you will find a brief presentation of current research projects:
At Center for Grundtvig Studies, director Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig has embarked on a pioneering journey delving into hitherto underexplored areas of Grundtvig's printed works. This initiative is a collaborative effort with the Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University, harnessing the power of supercomputing and a specialized AI developed from Grundtvig’s texts.
The Role of Supercomputing in Humanities
Supercomputing, a method pivotal in scientific research, is now revolutionizing the Humanities. It involves utilizing advanced computational resources to process and analyze large, complex datasets. Historically common in various scientific disciplines, supercomputing, paired with AI, is increasingly gaining traction in Humanities. Its application in this field allows for intricate analysis and mapping of language nuances and usage patterns across extensive textual volumes, offering insights into prevailing trends and themes in comprehensive works such as Grundtvig’s.
AI-Driven Analysis of Grundtvig's Works
Utilizing an AI model trained on Grundtvig's extensive literary corpus, encompassing over 1,000 texts, we can unearth semantic variations and associations. This model employs 'word embedding', a technique that elucidates the associative network of words in their contexts. It enables Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig to probe into the semantic core and the surrounding contexts of specific words across Grundtvig's writings. This approach reveals patterns, usage shifts, and the evolution of meanings within his works, providing a deeper understanding of his lexical choices and thematic shifts over time.
In their research, Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig and Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo director of Center for Humanities Computing, delve into subjects such as Grundtvig’s worldview. In their joint paper “Benign Structures. The Worldview of Danish National Poet, Pastor, and Politician N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872)” (2023) they employ the Grundtvig AI model in order to measure the semantic tissue binding together ‘Heaven’, ‘Earth’, and ‘Hell’ in his writings. They find that the world, in Grundtvig’s mind, runs on divine solar energy.
Here you find the paper: https://journals.uio.no/dhnbpub/article/view/10646
At the Center for Grundtvig Studies, we conduct research within philological disciplines and textual scholarship. Textual scholarship (also known as textual studies) encompasses a wide range of scientific methods and theories that all revolve around written text. Examples of this include editorial philology (the creation and publication of scholarly editions of written historical texts), the history of books, digital philology and textual sociology.
Grundtvig’s Works, a digital scholarly edition of the published works of N.F.S. Grundtvig, is a research project conducted by ten editorial philologists. Editorial director Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen’s research also focuses on a variety of general topics within textual studies - often this research is conducted as collaborations, such as:
Grundtvig’s Works, a digital scholarly edition of the published works of N.F.S. Grundtvig, is a research project conducted by ten editorial philologists. Editorial director Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen’s research also focuses on a variety of general topics within textual studies - often this research is conducted as collaborations, such as:
The role of textual commentary in the digital age
Are local comments, which are primarily used for clarification and explanation of specific points or references in a text, necessary in a digital scholarly edition, when it is possible to link all of these points to an overall database with general explanations and clarifications? Is it even possible to create a database that that spans and is relevant to multiple publications and research projects? It is easy to envision - or long for - such an option, which would remove the need to repeat the same explanations again in future publications, but will this cause the comments to become too general and unspecific, thereby rendering them useless? These questions will be explored further in an article written for a forthcoming anthology about the role of textual commentary in the digital age, set for publication by The Danish Language and Literature Society (Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen & Kirsten Vad).
Long-term conservation
There are no fixed plans in place for data management and data governance in digital scholarly editions, and it is vital that a qualified research infrastructure is established for this type of scientific project. We explore this question in our work, both practically and theoretically, and it is a topic we will continue to explore in the future. So far, it has resulted in two articles in English:
Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig, Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen, Per Møldrup-Dalum & Kirsten Vad (forthcoming) »Storage Over Rendition. Towards a Sustainable Infrastructure in the Digital Textual Heritage Sector«, in Proceedings of the 7th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2023). CEUR-WS.org, (CEUR Workshop Proceedings), online.
Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen, Jon Tafdrup, Kim Steen Ravn & Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig (2022) »The Case for Scholarly Editions«, in Proceedings of the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (DHNB 2022). CEUR-WS.org, pp. 401-405. (CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Bind 3232), online.
Grundtvig’s Works will amass and publish Grundtvig’s parliamentarian speeches for the first time ever, making them more accessible to the public. This work, done by Jens Wendel-Hansen, will create a unique foundation for the understanding of Grundtvig’s work as a politician, both in practice and ideology.
At the age of 65, Grundtvig was elected as a politician for the first time. Nevertheless, he was a member of parliament for close to ten years. He was a member of the Danish Constituent Assemble from 1848 to 1849, and, with only minor breaks, he was a member of the Folketing (one-half of the Danish Rigsdag) from 1850 to 1858. Finally, at the age of 82 he was elected for the Landsting (the other half of the Rigsdag, eliminated in 1953), where he served for a few months in 1866. Hitherto, research has primarily focused on Grundtvig’s participation in discussions about the constitution, but he spoke about many other subjects, e.g. mandatory military service, the right to choose one’s own profession, education, animal cruelty, and artists’ rights to their own works.
In addition to systematically analysing the political work of Grundtvig and its later significance, Jens Wendel-Hansen's research contributes to a general understanding of the parliamentarian culture surrounding the beginning of Danish democracy, and of Rigsdagstidende, the publication that printed Grundtvig’s speeches, as a historical source.
