The article is a result of the collaborative interdisciplinary workshop, which involved expertise from social sciences, history and digital humanities. It showed how computer mediated ways of researching historical networks and identity formation of NorwegianAmericans substantially complemented historical and social sciences methods. By using open API of the National Archives of Norway we used statistical, geo- and text data to produce an interactive temporal visualization of regional origins in Norway at the USA map. Spatial visualization allowed highlighting space and time and the original regional belonging in their home countries as fundamental values for understanding social and cultural dimensions of migrants' lives. We claim that data visualizations of space and time have performative materiality (Drucker 2013). They open a free room for a researcher to come up with his/her own narrative about the studied phenomenon (Perez and Granger 2015). Visualizations make us reflect on the relationship between the phenomenon and its representation (Klein 2014). This digital method supplements the classical sociological and socio-constructivist methods and can therefore enrich our knowledge of social phenomena. In the article, we show, what potentials this visualization has in relation to the particular field of emigration studies, when entering into a dialogue with the existing historical research in the field.
discourses and create and recreate identities and social realities, which are perceived as
flexible, changing and not possessing a certain once given and stable “core”. Participants of
social reality are, according to these methods “always already thrown” into the changing
linguistic and social world of human dwelling. The only possible thing is to study, or
reproduce are certain verbal or imaginary representations, but not a “true” substance or
reality. To social constructivists, there is no stable metaphysical ‘core’ from which people
operate and make sense of themselves and others (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982). Rather, the
infinite linguistic and cultural processes of meaning creation or representation, constructs
subjects. The discursive theory of representation was developed within cultural studies by
Stuart
With the rapid progress of information and communication technologies digitization of
science and humanities takes place. As Eric T.
1) The visualization on map:
https://knreise.carto.com/builder/5fd73b14-d197-11e6-a02e0e05a8b3e3d7/embed and statistical graphs use data from the National Archives of Norway.
They are based on Emigrant records collected by the Norwegian Police on all emigrants
leaving Norwegian ports. The original records include for example: name, sex, age/birth
date, embarking/register date, place of residence, occupation and intended destination.
These records have been transcribed by the National Archives of Norway and made public
through: http://digitalarkivet.arkivverket.no In 2016 the National Archives chose these
materials as a linked data pilot, and the transcribed data was linked to Wikidata and
Geonames using openRefine and made accessible through an API. The API delivers JSON-LD
and can be used to compile statistics on migration patterns, for example, the gender
percentage of Norwegian emigrants to each state in the United States from each Norwegian
county sorted by decade. The API also delivers information about each individual.
Our research became possible due to the possibilities offered by the digital tools shared
through Internet, which make it possible to bring together data, process them and make
available for various experts. Using Carto allowed us producing visualization of the
immigrant statistics (place of origin in Norway) on the USA map. The main method is that of
digital visualization. The method (picture 1) enables the thinking about this history of
Norwegian-American migration as a spatio-temporal phenomenon. It offers the interactive
temporal visualization of regional origins in Norway at the USA map. Migration from certain
regions in Norway is marked with a separate color. That will highlight space and time and the
changing regional belonging as fundamental values for understanding social and cultural
dimensions of migrants’ lives. Statistical graphs and texts, which is possible to produce (by
using for example, Plot.ly) complement the visualization on map and demonstrate the
contrast between relatively stable, but changing with migration, spatial values and varying
thematic data
Studying Norwegian migration to the USA (1870-1920): socio-constructivist approaches
Norwegian emigration to the USA. Between 1825 and today, nearly 1 million Norwegians left their homes. Especially during the period of mass immigration, from 1965 to 1939, a greater percentage of Norway’s population emigrated than any other country except Ireland. The majority of Norwegian immigrants settled in the Upper Midwestern states of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas. Other areas of the United States also witnessed Norwegian settlement, mainly in the Pacific Northwestern states of Oregon and Washington, in Brooklyn, New York, Alaska, and Texas. But in 1910 almost 80% of the one million Norwegian Americans living in the United States called the Upper Midwestern states home. Norwegian-American experience was rural in character. Researchers have been asking: What characterized their and their children’s experiences in the United States? Recent scholarship in the field has turned toward investigating the interactions Norwegians had with other immigrant and minority groups, including Native Americans and Swedes. Historians have also started paying more attention to the cultural, political, racial and ethnic factors that influenced the immigration experience.
As mentioned before, recently, researchers have used the socio-constructivist and
poststructuralist theory of representation as a starting point for theorizing identities and lived
lives of migrant subjects. Historical representations of migration and migrants’ lives are built
proceeding from an analysis of text documents, and discourses around ethnicity, sexuality
and gender. Migrants’ identity is looked at as a “creative and chaotic space of existence”
(Staunaes & Søndergaard 2006), a flexible notion, which is formed within a complex web of
societal discourses. There are proponents of the idea that any social characterization is too
narrow to describe the richness of individual experience. However, the majority of
researchers believe that operating with categories as gender, ethnicity, race, religion,
regional belonging and others can be meaningful
Proceeding from these socio-constructivist methods, the process of Norwegian migrants’ assimilation has been recently studied in terms of their advantage as white people in the race conscious American society of the 19th century. Alternatively, when raking into consideration the notion of ethnicity, other researchers show that Norwegian immigrants, who were settling in the urban Chicago area by the turn of the 20th century, developed a romantic sense of ethnicity, which was manifested in e.g. the activities of ski jumping and children’s parade on the constitution day on the 17th of May. Although the romantic sense of ethnicity could be therefore opposed to race consciousness, evoking feelings of pride. The dispute within the field has been centered on the question, which categories played the major role in the formation of migrants’ identities.
Historians have also shifted their attention to studying Norwegian immigration from a
perspective of their local belonging in Norway and its impact on the assimilation process in
the USA. In these works emigration and immigration – Norway and the United States – are
given equal treatment and understood in relationship to one another
The work of the computer mediated visualization is especially reliable as it is based on the metadata (place of origin, name, place of destination, gender, age) of the digitized original migrant protocols available at the National Archives of Norway. Digital visualization on the places of migrants’ origins in Norway on the USA map opens new questions to work with, for the historians, as to the impact of regional identities on class, gender and even racial and ethnic self-identifications. As it is known from previous research, Norwegians followed a fairly conservative pattern of assimilation, maintaining many cultural beliefs and traditions of their home country decades after immigration. For example, the Norwegian-American experience was distinctly rural in character. In fact, they were the most rural of any major immigrant group that went to the United States in the nineteenth-century a trait Odd Lovoll refers to as a “rural bond” Norwegian immigrants shared across the generations (Lovoll 1984). Living in rural communities, often surrounded by other Norwegian Americans, the rural nature of their American experience contributed to a slower assimilation rate amongst Norwegian Americans compared to their more urban-oriented Scandinavian counterparts, the Swedes and Danes.
Local and regional identities were important to Norwegian immigrants and their
descendants. Though regionalism was common to all immigrants, local identities appear to
have held special significance for Norwegians. Perhaps this was due to the physical
environment of Norway, with topographical conditions such as water and mountains
separating rural communities to the point of isolation. Many Norwegians came from places
with distinct local customs and traditions, including peasant dialects that could diverge
greatly from one another. It was often only after immigrating that Norwegians came into
contact with these unfamiliar variations on the Norwegian language (Lovoll 1984: 66-67).
Language formed the basis of regional cultures, but other practices such as dance, music,
games, folk art, and folklore developed alongside distinct dress, food, and social norms.
In the United States, Norwegian settlements were defined not only by a national identity,
but also by the rural Norwegian communities from which the settlers immigrated, often
referred to as bygd. Even in rural America, few Norwegian settlements consisted solely of
one bygd population. Most towns and parishes had people from several parts of Norway,
though people from a different district or valley in Norway often settled together in
particular neighborhoods or sections of a town
Historians have used immigration records, farm names, and census materials to identify
some of the local identities of Norwegian settlements in the United States. For example, Odd
Lovoll found that Benson Township in Minnesota was heavily settled by immigrants from
Gudbrandsdal, though there were also settlers from Trøndelag in the township. A
neighboring township was predominately settled by Nordjordings. Lovoll was able to further
narrow down the locations in Nordfjord where settlers came from by examining family
names on grave markers
The local identities of Norwegian immigrants have long been included in historical research on this topic, but rarely in terms of how local and regional identities affected the immigrant and settlement experience. Some of the first works published on local identities and Norwegian immigration were written by first and second-generation Norwegian immigrants themselves who asserted the presence of local and regional differences in the face of the national identity thrust upon them after immigrating.1 In the early 20th century, many of these Norwegian Americans came to form bygdelags, or Norwegian American social organizations with distinct regional and local identities. Much of the early postwar research on regionalism and Norwegian immigration focused on the development of bygdelags.
themselves in the creation of these organizations, and how these attachments changed over generations.2 In addition to this work on how regional and local identities were expressed in the United States through the bygdelag movement, scholars also investigated how the general trends in Norwegian immigration looked in particular locales. This research primarily focused on the sending regions in Norway and did not connect immigrants’ places of origin to their 1 Some of these thoughts are outlined in Waldemar Ager’s writings. See: Cultural Pluralism versus Assimilation: The Views of Waldemar Ager, edited by Odd Lovoll. Vol. 2. (Northfield, MN: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1977). 2 See, for example: Odd Lovoll, A Folk Epic: The Bygdelag in America. Boston: Published for the NorwegianAmerican Historical Association by Twayne Publishers, 1975). destinations.3 We know for example, that emigration from Tinn in Telemark country was largely spurred on by social and economic motives. Poor farmer laborers and landowners alike saw emigration as the best way to secure land of their own (Svalestuen 1983: 82-83). Economic conditions in Sogn, the county to lose a larger proportion of its population than any other, were also found to have stimulated mass emigration (Sunde 1983: 121-122). These examples demonstrate the emphasis most scholars have placed on local economic factors in studying the relationship between places of origin and causes of migration. In his book Den store utferda (The Great Exodus), Østrem answers his own call to shift the focus of study to the role cultural factors had in stimulating immigrants’ decisions to emigrate. His study investigated these motivations at the individual level in the communities of Skjold and Vats in Southeastern Norway (Østrem 2015). He found that at the local level three major factors came into play in determining whether someone emigrated: religion, chain or network migration, and to what extent movement was encouraged, accepted, and prevalent in a given place (Østrem 2015: 323-324).
Many previous studies of Norwegian immigration have either focused on the sending
country: Norway, or the receiving country: the United States. In 1960 Frank Thistlethwaite
called for studies of immigration that were transnational and followed individuals “from
their places of birth to their place of death.”4 While several historians have responded to this
call, studies that consider both the country a person emigrated from and the country a
person immigrated to are difficult to carry out because of the nature of source materials. In
spite of these limitations, there are some histories of Norwegian immigration that look at
both the specific regions people emigrated from and the specific regions they immigrated to.
An early example of this work is Jon Gjerde’s From Peasants to Farmers, which traced
immigrants from Balestrand, Norway to the Upper Midwestern states of Minnesota and
Wisconsin. He found that the key to understanding Norwegian American developments lay
in the tension between old cultures and new environments
There is also very little comparative research done on this topic. A recent dissertation
written by Erik Aalvik Evensen at the University of Oslo compared the migration of
immigrants from Hommedal parish to two settlements in the Midwest: St. Joseph Missouri
and East Norway, Kansas
The digital visualization can help stimulate more research into this area. Its interactive display of immigration trends from Norway, including the variables of chronology, gender, place of origin, and place of destination, provides a fertile starting point for researchers of immigration. This information will hopefully stimulate new discussions about the settlement of the United States over time by immigrants of varying backgrounds. It will potentially add new understandings or at least inspire new discussions of research on Norwegian immigrants to states outside of the Upper Midwest.
Additionally, this interactive map can aid researchers in asking comparative questions about
local identities and how they intersected with other kinds of identities, including age and
gender, to affect the immigration experience. Evensen’s comparative work investigating
immigrants from the same place in Norway in two different American settlements has
started this conversation. Hopefully more researchers will push even further and begin
comparing immigrants from regions or local environments with distinct cultures to see how
local identities affected immigration experiences in various regions of the United States
One final note that is not so much about the research implications of this work, but rather
about how this project can aid in the teaching of immigration. Someone who teaches a
course on Scandinavian immigration to the United States can often experience that students
draw their own maps displaying patterns of settlement of Norwegian immigrants because
there are no good maps already in existence. The digital map not only will assist students of
Scandinavian immigration in understanding and comparing Norwegian immigration patterns
across time and space, but it also promises to enrich the teaching of immigration more
broadly. Consider if other immigrant group experiences could also be mapped in this way
and a comprehensive, interactive map of American immigration could be created. For
example, if similar visualizations of Swedish, Danish and Finish immigration to the USA would
be done, we would enrich our knowledge on “Nordic spaces” outside the Nordic countries,
to the expression of L. Gradén, H.P. Larsen and S. Öster
Perez, Fernando and Brian E. Granger (2015) Project Jupyter: Computational Narratives as the Engine of Collaborative Data Science.
Staunaes, D. and Søndergaard, D. M. (2006) “Intersektionalitet – udsat for teoretisk justering”. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 2–3: 43–57.
Svalestuen, Andres A. (1983) «Emigration from the Community of Tinn» in NorwegianAmerican Studies. Edited by Odd Lovoll, Vol. 29 (Northfield, MN: The Norwegian-American Historical Association.
Sunde, Rasmus «Emigration from the District of Sogn, 1839-1915, » in Norwegian-American Studies. Edited by Odd Lovoll, Vol. 29 (Northfield, MN: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1983). Østrem, Nils Olav (2015) Den store utferda: Utvandring frå Skjold og Vats til Amerika 18371914 (Oslo, Norway: Scandinavian Academic Press.