Socknen i cyberrymden: Några tankar om en webbportal för språk, kultur och historia i regionerna (The Parish in Cyberspace: Some Musings on a Web Portal for Language, Culture, and History in a Regional Context)

Abstract

Currently, there is a plethora of web-based research resources and databases available to scholars as well as to the general public interested in scholarly information on a specific geographic location, such as one’s place of living or birth. Many of these resources, published on the web by research institutions, archives, museums, libraries etc., are, however, quite difficult to find through the web search engines most people use to navigate the web, nor is there any generally well-known link collection or other point of access from which all such resources easily can be spotted. Below, it is argued that some kind of web portal with a location-oriented user interface is needed to facilitate access to these resources and recent work on a prototype of such a portal is described, targeting primarily web sites that present research into language, culture, and history situated into a regional or local context. Taking its cue from how data are stored in most Swedish archives and museums, the article identifies the parish (‘socken’) as the natural primary focus of a location-oriented user interface and discusses both text-based and map-based variants of such an interface. In an appendix various data sources and candidate participants of a portal are listed and briefly described.