Research news

Fake news generated by AI is often perceived as more credible than texts written by humans. That worries linguist Silje Susanne Alvestad.

President Vladimir Putin’s family ideal is a heterosexual couple with two or three children. This is no coincidence, according to researcher Jules Sergei Fediunin.

Air raid sirens, drones, and bombs. The noise of war brings Ukrainians together, but it also creates different experiences depending on where you are. 

For centuries, intelligence, conspiracies, and love letters have been concealed in coded language. Now, digital tools can crack the old codes.

It is the foremost symbol of the American West. But the cowboy hat also tells a much more complex story about the USA. 

The prominent authors Proust, Kafka, and Woolf all wrote about portraits in the early 1900s. The new images generated both frustration and passion, argues Professor Marit Grøtta in a new book.  

Many climate campaigns use both verbal and visual metaphors. According to new research, this can give them particularly persuasive power. 

A hundred years ago, the Ukrainian author Isaac Babel wrote about grotesque acts of violence in the Polish-Soviet war. Today, authors like Babel are important when a new war rages in the same region. 

Researchers are now trying to solve something they are calling a scientific word mystery.

New research suggests that short breaks help you think more critically and creatively about what you are reading.

Verb tenses, pronouns and metaphors are some of the features that could vary in a text when writers try to deceive us. Norwegian linguists and computer scientists are now working together to create tools that can detect online disinformation.  

When Soviet artists omitted significant words or images from their work, this could both be an allusion to and a play on the lack of freedom of speech.

According to UiO researcher Cristina Gómez-Baggethun, the fact that Henrik Ibsen’s play keeps igniting debates about democracy shows that it is real art.

He was the Superman of the Middle Ages. But the first texts about him were about to crumble away, until a Norwegian professor took action. 

When you read texts that challenge the boundaries between reality and fiction, it may lead you to reflect on truths about yourself and the world you live in.

The power of reading fiction has been scientifically proven. Art can change your perception of yourself and others.

Mandatory teaching in minority languages and the practice of child exchange are some of the many ways in which Eastern Europeans have defied the idea of one nation – one language. 

Like republican presidents before him, Trump has massive support among white evangelicals. Climate change denial and the QAnon conspiracy theory strengthen that bond.

Through their work, African American writers tell the story of how power and whiteness are connected in American politics, says Professor Rebecca Scherr.  

“Darwin propagated the idea that humans are like other animals fighting for survival, but distinguished supposedly by our intellect. This logic makes it possible for some human lives to be seen as more valuable than others,” says Professor of literature Michael Lundblad.

A new wave of African American writers and artists entered the scene during the 1920s in the USA. The Harlem Renaissance’s political project aimed to elevate the status of black culture. 

To put it briefly: Ethnic Russians were much less loyal to the Soviet regime in their encounters with the German occupiers than historians have believed up to now. This is the story told by UiO researcher Johannes Due Enstad, who has recently published a book about the German occupation of Northwest Russia during World War 2.

What makes closely related languages have a different word order? This is what researchers in the Faculty of Humanities will find out.

Karl Ove Knausgaard was criticized for writing too fast. His reviewers felt it affected the quality of his work. The same view dominated in the seventeenth century. The ideal was that writers should take their time.

The few thousand Norwegians who emigrated to Latin America in the years from 1820 to 1940 went their own ways. Many of them never saw their dreams fulfilled and returned home disappointed.