Jonas Ingvarsson
Senior Lecturer
Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and ReligionAbout Jonas Ingvarsson
I am a docent in comparative literature, media and editorial practice. I returned to the University of Gothenburg in 2017, after commuting to Karlskrona, Karlstad, Växjö and Skövde for about 15 years after my doctoral studies in Gothenburg. In 2003, I defended my thesis En besynnerlig gemenskap: teknologins gestalter i svensk prosa 1965–70 [A strange community: the figures of technology in Swedish prose 1965–70] (Daidalos 2003). My teaching is currently mostly focused on the master's programs in Digital Humanities (for which I am the coordinator), and Critical Studies, but for several years I have also been involved in the Editorial Practice program.
In my research, I have since long focused on, among other things, media history, posthumanism, systems theory and digital humanities. The research project Representations and reconfigurations of the digital in Swedish literature and art 1950–2010 (RepRecDigit – together with Cecilia Lindhé, Jesper Olsson and Jakob Lien) which was funded by the Swedish Research Council resulted in two books: Bomber virus kuriosakabinett: texter om digital epistemology [Bombs Viruses Curiosty Cabinets. Text on Digital Epistemology] (Rojal förlag, 2018 – 100 handmade copies), and Towards a Digital Epistemology. Aesthetics and Modes of Thought in Early Modernity and the Present Age (Palgrave Macmillan 2020).
In these books, I have partly investigated digital imprints in literature that did not directly "deal" with digital phenomena, but rather are expressed as a form and style practice (what I somewhat pointedly called "a digital humanities sans digital tools and objects"); partly, I related the digital expression of our time – games, web pages, electronic literature, memes – to early modern forms and genres such as the emblem books, the cabinet of curiosities, the salon, and the archival order called "the principle of pertinence".
I conduct my current research as project manager for the project The New Order of Criticism. A mixed-methods study of a century and a half of literary criticism in Sweden, financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (until 2024). Together with Lina Samuelsson (Mälardalen University), Daniel Brodén (GU, GRIDH), Niklas Zechner (GU, Språkbanken Text) and until the turn of the year 2022/2023 Victor Wåhlstrand Skärström (GU, GRIDH) we have investigated how we with the help of digital tools and methods can challenge and possibly confirm the results from Samuelsson's “traditional” study The order of criticism. Swedish book reviews 1906, 1956, 2006, from 2013. This study was based on a material consisting of roughly 700 reviews, a material of which we have now made extensive digital visualizations, which in turn inspires new interpretations. We are also in the process of marking up all review material for the current years that is available at KB-Lab in Stockholm, in order to soon be able to compare Samuelsson's observations with a significantly larger text corpus. During the process, we also try to "train the machine" to identify a book review in a text corpus of daily newspapers. The project will end with an epistemological reflection on the outcome of these mixed methods - what can the quantitative analysis add to the traditional interpretation practice? How can traditional methods influence the computer-driven analysis.
I have also been engaged in the Nordic Avant-Garde Network, which among other things resulted in the volume Media and Materiality in the Neo-Avant-Garde (ed. together with Jesper Olsson, Peter Lang 2012), and I also contributed several articles to A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950–1975 (ed. Tania Ørum and Jesper Olsson, Brill 2016).