This is the log for my poster presentation ”Preserving the cultural heritage of Conspiracy Theories: The Case of ”Q” and QAnon”. Here I will post explanations of the research presented in the poster.

You might have reached this site through my Swedish webpage "Arkivfeber", or through the QR-code attached to my poster at the ICA 2023 Congress in Abu Dhabi.

To contact me reach out to my e-mail att Södertörn University, rikard.friberg.von.sydow[@]sh.se or via my Twitter @rikardfvs

Earlier, before I started working on the poster presentation described in this log, I have done two earlier posters regarding the Q-drop corpus - the collected drops that are ascribed to the mysterious poster "Q". In Sweden, education is free, so during a period I combined my work as a senior lecturer in archival science with studies in religious studies. For my bachelor thesis in 2020 I wrote about the myths of QAnon - and the thesis is avaliable in Swedish here. In 2021 I participated in the European Conference on Information Literacy with the poster "The Q-drops a content analysis", available here. In 2022 I participated in the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries 6th Conference with the poster presentation "Take these broken links”: Twitter, the Q-drops and the collapse of a digital ecosystem, available here.

In this poster I will use links to Youtube-clips present in the Q-drop corpus to test how many links are still valid. The QAnon-movement has been purged from most major platforms so the risk is, depending on the content presented in the linked Youtube-clips, that they don't work anymore. Dead links in a material created over time will make the content less usable in the future so this is important. Earlier I have converted all Q-drops to individual text-files which gives me the possibility to use the command GREP in a POSIX-compatible Operating System to fetch all content containing the word "youtube". To do this the formula grep "youtube" *.txt is used which will search all the text-files for the word "youtube".

Using Grep ended with having a txt-file with all the youtube-links present in the Q-drops. This text-file has been semi-manually analyzed using the textprocessor gedit. Gedit gives us the possiblity to read and edit texts and also to search for duplicated links et cetera. After a couple of days work during my summer vacation this file was produced; youtube.txt. To remove duplicated links the utility sed was used.

The first version of the poster can be reached here:

P-O-S-T-E-R.

It is created in LaTex, which is a markup language which together with an editor creates academic presentations such as posters and papers. The editor I use is "Gummi", but there are many others, even online editors as "Overleaf".