Can you combine the history of early modern witchcraft studies with open science? Sure!

In this episode of Open Science Talk, historian Rune Blix Hagen explains how. At the end of his career, he digitalized his research data at the library for others to use.

Witchcraft Studies

Historian Rune Blix Hagen works at the Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His research interests are early modern witchcraft studies and Jean Bodin.

He has written extensively on the witch trials in the north of Norway where many women and indigenous people were sentenced to death and burnt at the stake as a result of suspicions and rumors of practicing witchcraft.

Even though Blix Hagen will retire this year, he is actually the first person from his institute to openly archive his research data. In this podcast episode, he gives us some insight on how this work has been done, and also his experiences and expectations to publishing research data openly.

It’s Open Science, so have a look!

You can find his new dataset at DataverseNO or here:

If you want you can also see a video of Rune Blix Hagen explaining his work and his data in the video below. This video is in Norwegian.

And if you’d like to know more about Open Data for senior researchers, there is always this previous episode from Open Science Talk with guest Lars Figenschou from the University Library at UiT The Arctic University of Norway: Senior Scientists and Valuable Data