This study examines supernatural references in medieval Icelandic literature in light of modern Icelandic practice of otherworldly communication. Literary motifs are not merely fantastical story elements; rather they reflect a type of reality for participants and perform a social and cultural function in a historical and geographical context. While the manifestations of the supernatural in the medieval literature are many and varied and later inspired a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry, what is examined here is how Icelanders communicate with and interact with the other world, that is, the deceased, guardian spirits, and nature beings through prophetic dreams, mediums, and direct experience in nature and in community. I emphasize the social function of these phenomena over their representation as literary motifs and nevertheless reaffirm the role of literature as a medium of expression. At the same time, I explore the role of folklore in medieval and modern society and in popularly and scholarly manifestations. Sources and collection methods for the supernatural introduce researchers and methods that describe and document supernatural phenomena in Iceland. Mediation: mediums and media treats the ways experiences are mediated including by clairvoyants, clergy, rituals, dreams, nature, and the literature. Guardian spirits and dreams are cultural features of the Icelandic supernatural in the medieval literature, in personal accounts, and in national insignia. An ethnography of the other world uses accounts from participants and researchers to form a clearer picture of the world beyond. Research is from the humanities, social sciences, cognitive neuroscience and other disciplines, and calls for openness to phenomena that cannot fully be explained by current methods. Syncretic traditions involve a blend of spiritual experience and practice that extend beyond the parameters of heathenism and Christianity, including S�mi shamanistic influences and wider research approaches. Literature is considered as an art form with a relationship to landscape and nature that preserves and expresses an open secret of Icelandic otherworldly communication. It is among the durable media in which the old ways thrived. Where nature cannot be captured and not everyone has developed intuitive senses, literature is continually representative, repeatedly accessible, and perpetually open to interpretation.

This dissertation explores an emerging tourist destination’s transition from a former rural periphery into one of Korea’s fastest growing urban centers. In less than half a century, Cheju City, the capital of Cheju Island, grew from a sleepy provincial seat into a bustling tourist city with metropolitan ambitions. A central concern is how do residents of an emerging city become “urban”? Cheju Island has long been a curiosity in Korea due to its real and exoticized cultural differences from the mainland, but its present urban reality is often underadressed. The findings in this dissertation examine how the “Free International City” project begun since 2002 fundamentally altered ways of life and thinking and provoked complete reinventions of tradition and a rural Cheju imaginary. The new spaces of the city offered unprecedented means to organize resources and ideas. Cheju islanders developed their own urbanisms with local idioms that synthesize imported ideas to a Cheju-specific situation that also differs – and, at times, rejects – mainland Korean urbanisms. A further paradox of unprecedented contact with and interdependency on mainland Korea is that mainland-island divides have persisted rather than diminished. In the face of destruction, rural traditions and communities have also acquired a new vitality and definition as they become markers of island identity. Cheju City, as a constantly shifting geographical form and concept, functions as an axis around which islanders construct their everyday spaces and interactions amongst each other and with the wider world. From a combination of historical, statistical, and ethnographic perspectives, this dissertation analyzes the ways people of multiple walks of life articulate, imagine, enact, create, and resist the city.

The academic study of Scandinavian culture and Scandinavian literature has long ignored the engagement of the Nordic nations in the tradition of drama and performance in medieval Europe. Early drama history scholars like Sophus Birket Smith and G.E. Klemming made claims about a perceived lack of practice based on limited sources and most of the scholars who followed them have accepted those claims as valid. Unfortunately, Birket Smith and Klemming were working with an incomplete corpus and nineteenth-century ideas about what constituted “drama”. Later scholars such as Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker and Terry Gunnell have made great headway in expanding the concept of drama and performance within the field of Scandinavian studies while also clarifying what texts we do, in fact, still have. The work that has been done, however, is still far below the level of depth and complexity of work that has been done with the study of medieval drama and performance in other language traditions. It is my goal to gather and present a more complete corpus of early Scandinavian drama along with an analysis of the work that has been done to date. The goal of this dissertation is to offer an overview of this long misunderstood tradition and to introduce the international scholarly community to a revised corpus of medieval drama running the gamut from liturgical drama to secular comedy.

The image of a red cottage with white corners in a rural idyllic setting holds an iconic status in visual representations of Sweden, and has been produced and reproduced in commercial advertising and tourist industry as well as in the visual rhetoric of contesting political parties for over more than a century. The cottage’s conspicuous position in visual representations of Sweden speaks to the need for an in-depth analysis of the cottage as a trope of national identity. Despite this, it has not received greater attention in research on national symbols and national identity in the field of Scandinavian studies. My dissertation aims to fill this gap by a sustained, close reading of the red cottage as a continuous symbol through which national identity is manifested, and problematized.

To fully understand the contemporary position of the red cottage’s position as ”key-symbol” in visual representation of Sweden or ”Swedishness”, it is crucial to put it in its socio-historical context. In this dissertation, historical analysis is paired with semiotic visual studies. The broad use of the red cottage furthermore calls for an interdisciplinary approach. The theories used in the different sections are therefore drawn from the broad field of cultural studies, anthropology and consumer culture theory.

The stereotypical picture of a red cottage in a rural idyll emerged from the dovetailing of the urgent housing situation for the working class and the quest for a new, democratic nationalism during the early twentieth century. By using examples from education, tourism, advertising and politics, the dissertation shows how the red cottage over time was transformed into a Barthesian “myth”, where all possible meanings has been condensed and naturalized to the “Swedish home.” Through this overdetermination the rural idyll attracts users from a wide spectra, and has often been used to manifest opposing interests. Despite the stereotypical representation of the Swedish countryside, the cottage-idyll is part of a dynamic process of becoming rather than being. Although the depiction of the cottage idyll has remained quite static over the century, the question of who is to inhabit this home is a matter of constant negotiation.

A longstanding grand-challenge problem in AI is to build machines that are able to think and interact like humans do. A specific embodiment of this problem is a generalization of the cocktail party problem encountered in signal processing and blind signal separation: If an AI agent were to drop in at a crowded cocktail party then can it separate out and reconstruct the different underlying stories and narratives being discussed from a mixture of fragments of all the on-going conversations. Such a problem has taken on a renewed urgency: Narratives play a defining role in influencing critical decisions and worldviews of both the society at large and individuals, but the continual emergence of a multitude of conflicting narratives –enabled by large-scale adoption of social media– has created a global emergency, where the basic tenets of civil society and governance are being increasingly compromised. These narratives, some of which can be labeled as conspiracy theories, are composed of numerous characters connected by semantically diverse relationships situated in multiple and overlapping contexts. Injecting false facts happens in the context of such discussions, and solving such a misinformation problem is beyond a supervised classification task in natural language processing (NLP). In this dissertation, we develop a pipeline of interlocking computational and statistical modules - based on NLP tools and complex network theories– to extract meaningful narrative networks by distilling millions of social media posts. We develop a framework for semantic parsing of such narrative graphs (e.g. who are outsiders, their motivations and threats, and strategies of insiders) and evaluate the quality of these automatically derived communities in different ways. This framework takes a step towards enabling human-smart AI, where it can view the world as a human would.