Search, save and share: family historians' engagement practices with digital platforms.

Alongside established heritage institutions, family historians are central figures in the ecosystem of digital heritage, both as contributors to and users of digitized historical sources. With that in mind, this research aims for a wide examination of family historians' engagement with the broader selection of available digital platforms, providing knowledge about how and why they choose to use one platform over another. This knowledge is important for the future development of sustainable digital platforms in the heritage sector. With a large variety of digitized source providers, many with free access platforms, Denmark and Danish family historians make an excellent case for this study. Through both a questionnaire and focus group interviews, using a grounded theory approach, this study has developed a model of engagement with digital platforms, referred to as a buffet model. This model illustrates how family historians pick and choose from a selection of digital platforms throughout their search and management of information as well as their community interaction. Moreover, through the lens of the Serious Leisure Perspective we find that family history is often a life-long leisure activity and family historians' usage of digital platforms support this finding.

Older rationales and other challenges in handling causes of death in historical individual-level databases: the case of Copenhagen, 1880-1881.

Large-scale historical databases featuring individual-level causes of death offer the potential for longitudinal studies of health and illnesses. There is, however, a risk that the transformation of the primary sources into 'data' may strip them of the very qualities required for proper medical historical analysis. Based on a pilot study of all 11,100 deaths registered in Copenhagen in 1880-1881, we identify, analyse and discuss the challenges of transcribing and coding cause of death sources into a database. The results will guide us in building Link-Lives, a database featuring close to all nine million Danish deaths from 1787 to 1968. The main challenge is how to accommodate different older medical rationales in one classification system. Our key finding is multi-coding with more than one version of the ICD system (e.g. ICD-1893 and ICD-10) can be used as a novel method to systematically handle historical causes of death over time.

The spatiotemporal distribution of historical malaria cases in Sweden: a climatic perspective.

BACKGROUND: Understanding of the impacts of climatic variability on human health remains poor despite a possibly increasing burden of vector-borne diseases under global warming. Numerous socioeconomic variables make such studies challenging during the modern period while studies of climate-disease relationships in historical times are constrained by a lack of long datasets. Previous studies have identified the occurrence of malaria vectors, and their dependence on climate variables, during historical times in northern Europe. Yet, malaria in Sweden in relation to climate variables is understudied and relationships have never been rigorously statistically established. This study seeks to examine the relationship between malaria and climate fluctuations, and to characterise the spatio-temporal variations at parish level during severe malaria years in Sweden 1749-1859. METHODS: Symptom-based annual malaria case/death data were obtained from nationwide parish records and military hospital records in Stockholm. Pearson (rp) and Spearman's rank (rs) correlation analyses were conducted to evaluate inter-annual relationship between malaria data and long meteorological series. The climate response to larger malaria events was further explored by Superposed Epoch Analysis, and through Geographic Information Systems analysis to map spatial variations of malaria deaths. RESULTS: The number of malaria deaths showed the most significant positive relationship with warm-season temperature of the preceding year. The strongest correlation was found between malaria deaths and the mean temperature of the preceding June-August (rs = 0.57, p < 0.01) during the 1756-1820 period. Only non-linear patterns can be found in response to precipitation variations. Most malaria hot-spots, during severe malaria years, concentrated in areas around big inland lakes and southern-most Sweden. CONCLUSIONS: Unusually warm and/or dry summers appear to have contributed to malaria epidemics due to both indoor winter transmission and the evidenced long incubation and relapse time of P. vivax, but the results also highlight the difficulties in modelling climate-malaria associations. The inter-annual spatial variation of malaria hot-spots further shows that malaria outbreaks were more pronounced in the southern-most region of Sweden in the first half of the nineteenth century compared to the second half of the eighteenth century.

Differences in Health: The Influence of Gender and Institutional Settings on Sickness Claims in Gothenburg, Sweden (1898-1950).

Sickness funds information has given conflicting evidence on the evolution of morbidity during the mortality decline. Evidence on increased morbidity has been explained by an actual increase of morbidity, a cultural inflation of morbidity or changing institutional settings, however, morbidity rates have also been shown to be stable over time when age composition of members is controlled for. Most previous studies have been confined to data on men; however, in an earlier article, Castenbrandt found large gender differences in historical sick leave by using national statistics on both men and women. To move forward, this article aims to analyse trends in sickness claims during the mortality decline in the early twentieth century using individual level data from Swedish sickness funds covering the period 1898-1950. Concretely, we investigate gender differences in sickness claims (incidence and duration) and how institutional settings (member composition and fund-specific regulations) affected the sick leave patterns.