Peter Seeberg and the National Museum of Denmark’s Studies of Industrial, Skilled and Unskilled Workers
TRANSITION Data Lab with Jeppe Barnwell, University of Copenhagen.
How does literary form emerge from archival practice? In this first public TRANSITION Data Lab, Jeppe Barnwell invites us into the early museum work of author Peter Seeberg and its influence on his development of fictional documentarism — a literary form shaped by archival voices, fragmentary accounts, and impersonation of everyday language. Drawing on Seeberg’s involvement with the National Museum’s studies of industrial, skilled, and unskilled workers in the 1950s, Barnwell explores how institutional fieldwork provided Seeberg with access to the prose of ordinary people and how this voice became a hallmark of his later literary style. The session thus invites reflection on the entanglements between ethnographic record, literary experimentation, and the ethics of representation.
TRANSITION Data Labs are hands-on sessions where researchers gather around data from ongoing work on rural-urban transitions. The format is inspired by public humanities approaches: open-ended, reflective, and collective. Data Labs are a place to explore material together — across disciplines, methods, and perspectives, and everyone interested in discussing Barnwell’s material and the questions it raises is warmly welcome.
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