User:LA2/Dafne
The Wikimania conference 2019 is organized on the campus of Stockholm University. The same campus is also the setting of a 1987 novel, Anders och Dafne by Göran Hägg, on the creation of another electronic encyclopedia. Unfortunately, the Swedish original has never been translated. Here is an attempt at a background and summary.
Historically, Sweden has two old universities at Uppsala and Lund. Both towns are cathedral cities (all schools were part of the church) rather than centers of industry and commerce. The nation's capital only got a college in 1878, sponsored in part by the city magistrates. It became a fully governmental university in 1960 and in the 1970s moved from various buildings downtown to the current campus on the city's northern outskirts, an area named Frescati by king Gustav III after his journey to Italy in 1784. (When students revolted at Sorbonne in Paris in 1968, students in Stockholm occupied their own student union building; however this was not at Frescati, but still in downtown Stockholm.)
The first encyclopedias in Swedish were published in the 19th century. The first really (overly) ambitious project was Nordisk familjebok , started in 1874 and planned as a six-volume work. A decade later, with volume 10 only reaching letter K, the project ran out of money and was saved by a state subsidy. After this first edition was finished with 18 volumes in 1894, two supplementary volumes followed in 1896 and 1899, and a second edition in 38 volumes in 1904–1926. Several other encyclopedias followed, but after the 1950s they only got smaller, which commercial publishers found more profitable. Swedish consumers invested in refrigerators, tvs and cars, rather than encyclopedias. Just when neutral Sweden rose as the most successful postwar economy, there was a lack of large encyclopedias. Should schools have to do with five- or ten-volume sets? A government committee was appointed in 1977 and in 1980 recommended a governmental procurement auction, which took place in 1985 and resulted in Nationalencyklopedin (20 volumes, 1989–1996), later made available as CDROM and online by subscription.
Some visionaries were disappointed by the idea to produce a traditional printed encyclopedia, wanting instead a computer database, an encyclopedia for the future. One such scenario is presented in the novel Anders och Dafne (1987). The author, Göran Hägg (1947–2015), was a lecturer in the history of literature at Stockholm University. Several of his novels had satirized the bureaucratic tendencies of the Swedish educational system, and this one is no exception. Anders, through his brother, gets a job as chief editor of a new encyclopedia, which is developed as a public-private joint venture. Dafne is not the nymph from Greek mythology, but an acronym for the central DAtabas För NationalEncyklopedin. The editorial office is placed in a small cottage building, Skogstorpet, on the campus of Stockholm University. This is a real building, now used by the department of political science. The central computer is housed in the basement under the nearby library, built in 1983.
Co-sponsors of the joint project include the government's department of education, defense and the union of private entreprise, where Anders' brother works. You'd guess that the hero's sympathies would be with the educators, but it turns out they want to abolish teachers and replace them with computerized knowledge, which makes Anders revolt and almost take sides with the militaries.
/To be continued/