The infrastructural project “Digitalisation of Herbert Tingsten’s scientific and political writings and political journalism” has aimed to compile, edit, digitalise, thematise, and digitally republish the Swedish political scientist and journalist Herbert Tingsten’s scientific and political writings and political journalism. Tingsten was active as a researcher and teacher of political science at Skytteanum in Uppsala during the 1920s and –30s, and assumed Lars Hierta’s professorship in political science at Stockholm University in 1935. Between 1946 and 1959, he was editor in chief of Dagens Nyheter. Tingsten’s deed as a political scientist came to coincide with the subject’s development into a modern social-scientific discipline, and he led and personified the development in many ground-breaking works – not only in Sweden, but internationally. As a publicist and editor in chief of Sweden’s largest morning paper, he set the agenda for the public debate during the first two decades of the post-war period.

The infrastructural project has been of national concern, and has been a collaboration between the departments of political science in Lund, Stockholm, Uppsala, and Örebro on the one hand, and the University Library in Lund, the Royal Library in Stockholm, Dagens Nyheter, and Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift, on the other hand. The project has been led by senior lecturer Björn Badersten (main applicant), in collaboration with professor Mats Lindberg, Örebro University. An editorial board has been connected to the project, consisting of representatives from the contributing departments (Magnus Jerneck, Lund University; Ludvig Beckman and Ulf Mörkenstam, Stockholm University; Li-Bennich Björkman and Jörgen Hermansson, Uppsala University). Organizationally, the project has been located at the Department of Political Science, Lund University.


THE AIM AND PROCEDURE OF THE PROJECT

The project has had five connected, more specific aims based on the main goal: 1) to digitalise and digitally republish Herbert Tingsten’s scientific and political writings; 2) to digitalise Tingsten’s political journalism, primarily in the role of editor in chief of Dagens Nyheter; 3) to clarify the relationship between scientific production, books concerned with political debate, and standpoints in journalism by dividing these into periods and themes; 4) to set up a publicly available portal/website, where Tingsten’s production is searchable and possible to survey in full text; 5) to make a new research possible.

All of these aims have been reached during the project period, although the fifth aim – to make new research possible – looks more toward the future, for natural reasons. A slight change has taken place during the course of the project, in the sense that the ambition has been widened to include digitalisation of Tingsten’s writings as a whole, and has thus also come to include, for example, his popular-scientific work, his literature analyses and his more personal authorship.

More concretely, the project has been carried out in five partly overlapping phases:

1) A preparatory phase, which has included the establishment of a complete bibliography of Herbert Tingsten’s writings, alongside a collection of material as a preparation for digitalisation.

2) A digitalisation phase, where the collected material has been converted into searchable PDF documents according to current principles of digitalisation and preservation, with accompanying editorial work. This part of the project has been carried out with the help of the University Library (UB) in Lund, the Royal Library in Stockholm, and, in the final stages of the project, Dagens Nyheter.

3) A publication phase, which has included dividing Herbert Tingsten’s production into themes and periods, and digitally publishing it on a publicly available portal/website with the address www.tingstensamlingen.se according to the current principles for Open Journal Systems (OJS), i.e. the platform that the University Library in Lund uses for open-access publication. This has been done with the permission of Herbert Tingsten’s heirs.

4) A maintenance phase, which includes the management, upkeep, and development of the established portal/website, which has been regulated by an agreement between Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift and the University Library in Lund.

5) A distributional phase, which includes using the digitalised material and making it visible in scientific and culture-conservational contexts.

Phases 1-3 are fully completed. Phases 4 and 5 are, for natural reasons, only partly fulfilled, and give rise to a long-term work.


THE RESULTS OF THE PROJECT

The project has, in line with the over-arching aim, resulted in a publicly available portal/website, on which Herbert Tingsten’s collected works are available, a website that the project has chosen to call “Tingstensamlingen”. The portal/website has the address www.tingstensamlingen.se; senior lecturer Björn Badersten is legally responsible for the website. “Tingstensamlingen” includes nearly 70 monographs, around 90 contributions to anthologies, ca. 135 journal articles, and more than 3 250 articles from daily newspapers. In total, there are more than 17 000 pages of text that have been digitalised, categorised and made available through the collection, a volume that by fare exceeds what the project had initially counted on. This is partly a result of the fact that the project’s ambition has been broadened (see information above), but it is also a result of the fact that Tingsten’s collected works is much larger than what the project imagined based on previous compilations. An important result of the project is thus the complete bibliography of Herbert Tingsten’s writings that has been established, and thus formed the basis of the digitalisation.


TECHNICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

During the work process, the project has faced many methodological challenges. The first challenge was what could be called “the bibliography problem”. The work on setting up a complete bibliography of Herbert Tingsten’s writings, which has never been done before, has been more time-consuming than the project initially imagined – not least given Tingsten’s very extensive production as a publicist, especially as the editor in chief of Dagens Nyheter. This material has not been listed before.

The digitalisation of the printed material has proved to be another challenge, not least regarding the extensive newspaper material. The technology of digitalisation develops quickly, and one of the reasons that the project’s ambition has been able to increase within the framework for the prevailing budget is the technological progress, which has simply reduced the cost for the digitalisation during the duration of the project. Thereto, it has helped the project that Dagens Nyheter has initiated their own digitalisation project and carried this out during the latter part of the project’s duration.

An additional challenge has been the “categorisation problem”, e.g. how the digitalised material should be classified and made visible in the best way possible. In many ways, Herbert Tingsten crossed borders – both within the framework of his own scientific production, where he crossed sub-disciplinary borders, but also in the sense that he successfully combined the role of a scientist with the role of a publicist. Therefore, it has been difficult to find appropriate ways to categorise Tingsten’s production. In this respect, the project has landed in a compromise, where the digitalised material has been categorised in a partially overlapping way, partly based on traditional sub-disciplines in the subject field of political science, and partly based on categories that have been inductively generated based on the material.


THE ORGANISATIONAL INTEGRATION AND CONSOLIDATION OF THE PROJECT

By the end of the project’s duration, the main responsibility was taken over by Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift, which is the main publication forum for political science in Swedish and the main body for Statsvetenskapliga förbundet. The journal, whose editorial office is located at the Department for Political Science in Lund, is responsible for the management and maintenance of the collection and guarantees the long-term availability and distribution of the collection through the journal’s connection to Fahlbeckska stiftelsen and Statsvetenskapliga förbundet. Technically, the collection is managed by the University Library in Lund by agreement with the journal. The open and flexible publication format makes it possible to develop the portal in the future, for example by making visible the research that could be carried out based on the material available.


NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS THAT HAVE BEEN GENERATED THROUGH THE PROJECT

Research in a variety of areas is now possible due to the available material: biographical research, not least regarding the relationship between Tingsten’s scientific and journalistic achievements; regarding history of press, which, for example, could be centred around Dagens Nyheter’s position and dominance in the public debate during the post-war era and as a political actor with a culturally left and social-liberal focus; concerning history and theory of science, for example when it comes to the relationship between academic and public debate during the post-war era where Tingsten was a central actor, the universities’ position vis-à-vis politics and the view of the “third task”, and the disciplinary development of political science into a modern subject within social sciences; and regarding theories of democracy and constitutional politics, especially Tingsten’s position in the national and international democracy-theoretical discourse, and his role in the formation of a parliamentary, representative, and procedural view of democracy in Scandinavia.


WEBSITE

As was previously mentioned, the infra-structural project’s main result consists of an open website with the address www.tingstensamlingen.se.