The purpose of the project Remembering Selma Lagerlöf was twofold: to communicate the results of a previous project, The Readers’ Selma Lagerlöf 1891–1940, and to collect previously unknown and privately-owned letters by Selma Lagerlöf. In the previous project, The Readers’ Selma Lagerlöf 1891–1940, the letters to Selma Lagerlöf from the public was investigated. The specific aim of Remembering Selma Lagerlöf was to find out how Lagerlöf responded to the letters from the public and to make the letters available in a digital exhibition. The project consisted of three parts: 1) selection and image editing of letters from the public and publication of results from the previous project, The Readers’ Selma Lagerlöf 1891–1940 2) collection of new material based on the participation of the public, more precisely owners of letters from Lagerlöf 3) presentation of these materials in a digital exhibition.

The project lasted twelve months during 2018. Already in connection to the approval for funding of the project in December 2016, it attracted attention in newspapers. This in turn lead to an interest from local radio stations and a number of short interviews about the project were made. As a consequence, letters from willing participants began to be submitted through email already before the project had begun and the project website was in place. In March 2018 the webpage was fully developed, and a Facebook page used for outreach and for linking to the webpage was launched. Besides the information about the project published in the newspapers, more targeted publications such as Svensk historia and Släkthistoria also wrote about it. The project was also presented by the project members at Kulturveckan i Sunne, the conference “Selma Lagerlöf 2018 at Karlstad University June 18-20 2018, at the Book Fair of Gothenburg in September 2018, and at DHN2019, Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th Conference, Copenhagen March 6-8 2019.

The webpage, http://minnenavselma.org, was developed in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) at the University of Gothenburg. The criteria it needed to fill was easy accessibility and navigation for the users and a possibility to contextualize and group the published material (i.e. not only show the letters as exhibition objects in themselves). Each letter has been tagged with keywords that are clickable and visible at the bottom of all pages. The names of the addressees are visible in the same way, and by links provide access to letters to individual persons. In the menu at the top of the page you are also able to find a selection of letters to Selma Lagerlöf (i.e. a selection of the letters that were studied in The Readers’ Selma Lagerlöf 1891–1940). The published examples of those letters are representative of different categories important in the letter collection as a whole (letters from readers, letters about financial aid, letters about the senders’ own artistic work, letters concerning education, and letters about religion).

The menu also leads to a simple web form where people in possession of a letter can upload a digitized copy of it. The web form was designed to register essential information about the letter, but even so, it has been necessary to get in touch directly with the participants to be able to contextualise the letter and/or the sender. This took some time but also meant that the persons who volunteered letters and information to the project got feedback, and we have been able to use their knowledge thoroughly. Some letters have also been sent to the project by mail or email. In the latter case, the participants of the project have digitized them.

To this date, the website has 39 articles, but the number of letters is 75, since the articles in many cases address several letters. Usually the articles concern one receiver, but exceptions have been made for different categories such as very short thank you notes. The letters are wholly or partly transcribed depending on their length. It is important to keep in mind that the aim of the project was to collect letters, not to transcribe them, which is a time-consuming task. Why we still partly transcribed the letters was due the ambition to make them more available to those who are not used to read older, hand written material. In the cases where the letters are only partly transcribed the content is summarized.

When possible both letters from and to Selma Lagerlöf have been published together. A number of interesting connections to the letters that earlier have been studied in the project The Readers’ Selma Lagerlöf 1891–1940 have been discovered. For instance, the letter collection resulted in new knowledge about how Lagerlöf answered aspiring authors that wanted advice on their work and help to get it published. The project also received letters that can be grouped into many of the categories represented in the earlier studied letters to Lagerlöf: invitations, requests from journals wanting to publish works of Lagerlöf, letters about Lagerlöf’s literary work, and letters concerning relatives, friends and neighbours. However, there are no answers to letters from people in search of economic help (a substantial category of letters researched in Readers’ Selma Lagerlöf 1891–1940). They may have been preserved to a lesser extent due to poor living conditions or shame of having written letters begging for money.

The collected letters present new knowledge on how Selma Lagerlöf dealt with the many letters she received daily during her career. That she received and kept many thousands of letters from unknown people has been made clear by Readers’ Selma Lagerlöf 1891–1940. Through notes on letters we also know that the author in many cases answered, but the letters collected by Remembering Selma Lagerlöf provide concrete examples of how she answered. The most interesting information concerns how Lagerlöf handled the big number of letters that concerned advice and help on publication of the letter writers’ own texts. These letters show – in addition to what they say about reading at the time – how people used writing as a part of an identity formation, and how Lagerlöf responded with professional advice.

Unlike many other citizen humanities projects, Remembering Selma Lagerlöf has not only been dependent upon people wanting to contribute, but also on being able to find the right channels through which recipients of letters from Selma Lagerlöf – or their relatives or others owners of letters – could be reached. The attention in national and regional media (radio and newspapers) was therefore very important. The project was initially also meant to collect other kinds of material memories of Lagerlöf; items of cultural heritage such as photographs or other objects that in different ways can shed more light on Lagerlöf’s relation to her audience. This was not as successful as collecting the letters though – maybe since the project seems to have been understood as mainly focused on the letters. Facebook campaigns were used to reach a bigger crowd but for a project such as this, it proved to be less efficient than traditional media. However, the Facebook page was used to publish material of this kind, e.g. photos of meetings with Selma Lagerlöf, a shoe that was found, and that was interpreted by a school class as belonging to Nils Holgersson, and post cards from locations connected to Lagerlöf’s work.

The active phase of the project was ended in December 2018, but the web page will continue to be available and technically maintained by CDH. Letters submitted after the project’s end will still be published, although more irregularly. The digital copies of the letters that have been collected have been donated to the National Library in Stockholm for long-time preservation. The advisory board included Mats Malm, professor of comparative literature, director of the Swedish Literature Bank, and the project leader of the Arosenius Archive which have also been working on collection of material, Cecilia Lindhé, Ph.D of comparative literature, and director of CDH, and Christopher Kullenberg, assistant professor of Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg and specialized in citizen science. Cecilia Lindhé och CDH have assisted the web development, Christopher Kullenberg has provided feedback on methods and implementation, and Mats Malm and other participants in the Arosenius Archive have shared advice based on their experience of collecting cultural heritage material. A more thorough discussion on the considerations on methods and theories of the project is available in ”Managing Uncertainties. Small-scale Crowdsourcing of Author Letters, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/4_paper.pdf.