Analog Resources and Digital Limitations
Navigating Old Norse Academia as an Early-Career Scholar
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7557/5.6206Keywords:
open access, norse, viking, digital resources, print mediaAbstract
See RECORDING.
Following the completion of a bachelor in History, started in France but completed in Tromsø as an exchange student, I started to develop an interest for Scandinavian History and culture, which translated in me moving to Iceland to enroll in the Old Norse Religion MA program at the university of Iceland in 2013. After graduation, three years later, I began the life of an unaffiliated early-career scholar eager to make use of my newly-acquired knowledge. Since then, I have met with a number of obstacles related to access to scientific publications and source material, as well as discovered and developed ways around such problems.
Working largely outside the framework of a higher-education establishment, my academic experience has so far been characterized by the mixing of traditional research methods and resources with more informal approaches. Finding primary sources, always a capital task for researchers of older History, is the perfect example of how contemporary Old Norse scholars combine long-established resources such as scholarly editions and manuscript transcription with less well-established web-based material such as amateur translations and commentaries.
Online support and networking groups, largely operating via social media pages also do play an important role in facilitating collaboration between scholars, wanna-be scholars, and other enthusiasts, as well as making less-accessible resources more widely-distributed. One such example of collaborative internet-based academic project is the current Old Norse translation network I have been a part of since last year. Gathering individuals currently or formerly employed in academia, as well as enthusiastic amateurs and prospective academics, it makes for a relevant case study. This can be used to demonstrate how contemporary Old Norse scholars must operate in a hybrid field where the ever-growing amount of online resources must nevertheless be critically balanced with traditional published sources in order to conduct research.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Lyonel Perabo

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).