Widholm, Christian

International Journal of the History of Sport 2012, 29 (7): 1001-1015.

This article explores discourses on nationalism and masculinity in Swedish media texts about Hannes Kolehmainen between 1909 and 1966. The collective Swedish memory of the Finnish long distance champion Hannes Kolehmainen consists of media stories from the first half of the twentieth century. Today there are probably very few Swedes who know about Kolehmainen. But during the Olympic games of 1912 and 1920 he was depicted as a true sports hero and given extensive space in the Swedish press. The Swedish press, however, provided glimpses of Kolehmainen already in 1909 and cultivated his heroic aura when he was mentioned in the stories of the opening ceremony of Helsinki Olympiad of 1952. The last colourful example of Swedish worship of Kolehmainen was an obituary published in 1966. The Swedish media texts on Kolehmainen certainly dealt with his outstanding athletic qualities. However, the stories also conveyed Swedish notions about Finnish-ness and, implicitly, ideas on proper Swedish manliness during the first half of the twentieth century.

Scandia 2011, 2 : 155-170.

Since the end of the 1970s, those wishing to consult newspaper archives in research libraries are referred to copies on microfilm. Despite the fact that microfilm is in many respects a problematic source-medium, there has been no academic discussion of this fact in Sweden. A series of official government inquiries (in 1949, 1972, 1975, and 1976) acknowledged that the substitution of microfilmed copies for the originals could have a detrimental effect on research, yet the switch to microfilm went ahead nevertheless. The decision to microfilm contemporaneous newspapers and to retroactively microfilm older material was justified on financial and conservation grounds: microfilm was thought cheaper to handle than bulky originals, and newsprint would be destroyed if handled too much or would disintegrate because of the poor quality of the paper. In normal circumstances, reading a newspaper involves holding it, feeling the paper in one’s hand, turning the pages, viewing double-spreads that are never definitively in black and white, glancing through in a non-linear fashion, and then folding the paper and putting it down. Reading newspapers on microfilm involves pressing buttons, scrolling queasily down a stream of single pages, the black and white images blurring into one. The substitution of microfilm for newsprint hampers the semiotic analysis of the older daily press, and the striking difference between microfilm-reading and the type of newspaper-reading described in the major theories of the emergency of modern society, for example Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, are two aspects that illustrate the deficiencies of microfilmed newspapers as a source. The digitalization of older newspapers from their microfilm copies serves merely to cement the disadvantages of the latter medium. Recently, however, microfilm producers have embarked on a constructive discussion that promises to address some of the problems.