An Evaluation of”Middle Ages Dead or Live?”The first interactive exhibition at the National Museum of History

This is a study conducted at, and for, the National Museum of History in Stockholm. The aim of the study was to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis that visitors in a traditional museum environment might not take part in interactivity in an interactive exhibition. And if they do the visitors might skip the texts and objects on display. To answer this and other questions a multiple method was used. Both non participant observations and exit interviews were conducted. After a description of the interactive exhibits, theory of knowledge and learning is presented before the gathered data is presented. All together 443 visitors were observed. In the observations the visitors were timed on how much time they spent in the room, the time spent on the interactivity, texts and objects. In the 40 interviews information about visitors’ participation in the interactivity was gathered. What interactivity the visitor found easiest, hardest, funniest and most boring.The result did not confirm the hypothesis. All kinds of visitors, children and adults, participated in the interactivities. The visitors took part in the texts and objects and the interactive exhibits.

Underkuvade kunskaper och genealogins möjligheter

Subjugated knowledges and the possibilities of genealogy The article explores the possibilities of “voicing” marginalized subjects by analyzing letters written by female mental patients in the beginning of the twentieth century. Following Michel Foucault, genealogy is here used as a means to explore and reclaim subjugated knowledges, i.e. knowledges that have been dismissed, distorted, disqualified and put aside by more powerful and ultimately victorious knowledge claims, in this case the psychiatric discourse. Historically oriented research on madness has often explored medical and cultural discourses and representations, as these correspond to sources that can be easily found in archives. This also means that mental patients’ own narratives and texts have been more difficult to trace, partly due to the paucity of available documentation. Herein lies a challenge: how can we represent these subjects, whose stories are inevitably always already captured and filtered by authorities, without portraying them either as passive victims or reducing them to effects of power networks? The article thus ponders research ethics, the question of Otherness and the power of representations. The difficulties in representing female patients’ “own”voices are discussed, yet the article points to the necessity of taking voices that are simultaneously in the margins and in the centre of more powerful discourses, seriously as objects of knowledge. The article argues that “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges”, i.e. bringing back such knowledges as represented here by mental patients’ narratives, opens us otherpossibilities of knowledge. Hence, mental patients’ letters are seen as important “fractures” in the official and legitimized knowledge of madness, offering alternative understandings of both committed individuals and the psychiatric discourse itself.

Road network and GPS tracking with data processing and quality assessment

GPS technology has been embedded into portable, low-cost electronic devices nowadays to track the movements of mobile objects. This implication has greatly impacted the transportation field by creating a novel and rich source of traffic data on the road network. Although the promise offered by GPS devices to overcome problems like underreporting, respondent fatigue, inaccuracies and other human errors in data collection is significant; the technology is still relatively new that it raises many issues for potential users. These issues tend to revolve around the following areas: reliability, data processing and the related application. This thesis aims to study the GPS tracking form the methodological, technical and practical aspects. It first evaluates the reliability of GPS based traffic data based on data from an experiment containing three different traffic modes (car, bike and bus) traveling along the road network. It then outline the general procedure for processing GPS tracking data and discuss related issues that are uncovered by using real-world GPS tracking data of 316 cars. Thirdly, it investigates the influence of road network density in finding optimal location for enhancing travel efficiency and decreasing travel cost. The results show that the geographical positioning is reliable. Velocity is slightly underestimated, whereas altitude measurements are unreliable.Post processing techniques with auxiliary information is found necessary and important when solving the inaccuracy of GPS data. The densities of the road network influence the finding of optimal locations. The influence will stabilize at a certain level and do not deteriorate when the node density is higher.