Keywords

With targeted search terms , users can scroll streams of thumbnail images depicting Viking objects on YouTube Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs ). Viking helmet thumbnails index the content of their respective videos, which often glorify brutal, White, male warriors and their conquests. Emblematised by the helmet, this take on Vikings clashes with the narrativising of this object by the Swedish History Museum (SHM) in relation to the everyday, non-warring lives of the people living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age (793–1066 CE). How the meanings of museum objects on social media differ from those put forward by museums is approached through the prism of a previous methodological study examining the role of location in the personalisation of historical narratives of museum objects on YouTube SERPs (Pietrobruno 2021). This method is reconfigured here to consider both location and language in the personalisation of YouTube SERPs and their connection to historical narratives. The approach outlined here tracks the stories of the Viking helmet obtained using French-language keywords on personalised SERPs and compares them with those generated by non-personalised, anonymous SERPs. The narratives in French are matched to those obtained with the same keywords translated into English (Pietrobruno 2021). A key concern is whether the Viking helmet on French-language SERPs is radicalised by far-right politics as it was in the previous English-language study (Pietrobruno 2021). The role of language and location is demonstrated through the correlation of these narratives with the preferred historical narratives of the SHM.

This methodological revision is contextualised through the intersection of media theory, narratives and museums. Similar processes of display convey the meanings of museum objects in exhibitions and in digital objects on SERPs. This hermeneutic process is reflective of a given object’s position within the exhibition space of the actual museum or within the social network space of SERPs. The stories forged from a museum object are derived from the work of a curator or curatorial team who assume responsibility for its concept and content (Kaplan 1994, 39). On YouTube, the “curation” of meaning emerges out of the interplay of user-generated content, algorithmic automation (including personalisation) and the platform’s business models, which together produce the content of personalised SERPs and hence their continuously updated streamed display. The philosophy behind the methodological revision of joining two media forms—actual museum exhibitions and personalised YouTube SERPs—is grounded in the way that museum display can also employ forms of individual customisation to generate meaning by allowing visitors to personalise their exhibition experience. In the curation of meaning in both actual and online exhibitions, personalised search technology is breaking ground. This development of a methodological approach showcasing how YouTube SERPs personalise historical narratives through both location and language for customising meaning generation is significant for museum studies, as personalising meaning via participatory practices in online exhibitions may take precedence in the curation of museum objects in the future. In its focus on the personalisation of content on YouTube, this research is distinct from current scholarly work that addresses the relation between YouTube videos and archaeological and museum narratives (Williams and Clarke 2020; Zuanni and Price 2018).

Exhibitions, Search Engine Result Pages and Media

The production of meaning in museum exhibitions converges with its production in the display of content on YouTube SERPs through their shared status as media forms. Exhibitions use media to tell their stories through the integration of a range of objects with architectural elements, sound, seating, film, video, slide projection, computers, simulation and live elements (Kaplan 1995, 40). Museum exhibitions not only showcase individual objects but also bring them together through narrative sequencing. In this process, exhibitions emulate the task of media (Silverstone 1988, 236–237). Stephen Bann (1984) demonstrates how museum period rooms, popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would freeze a moment in time, echoing the development of photography in that era (see also Ernst 2005, 597; and Henning 2020a, 12). Roger Silverstone (1988, 232, 234) shows that the display language of the museum emulates television specifically through its documentary format, which creates a discursive balance between entertainment and information. The fragmented structure of exhibitions that combine reality and fantasy through the interplay between “real” archaeological objects and imagined visions of the past emulates how television documentaries tantalise their audiences by embedding historical “facts” within fun and fanciful modes of delivery (ibid., 233). Mike Jones (2005, 37) argues that meaning creation in museum exhibitions with objects gathered from diverse historical times and geographies parallels the generation of meaning in cinematic montage, which juxtaposes visual moments in space and time. Mieke Bal (2007, 77–78) also equates the production of narratives through juxtaposed museum objects with cinematic montage. She likens cinematic close-ups, which briefly distance the audience from linear storytelling, to instances of exhibition design that compel audiences to focus on a particular object while stalling their movement through the exhibition and its narrative. She envisions museumgoers as performing an exhibition as though it were a film and engaging with its cinematic “meaning-producing sequentiality” as they walk through it (ibid., 73, 89). Moreover, for Jones (2005, 36), neither the museum objects in an exhibition nor the discrete shots in a film have any innate meaning. Rather, it is through the combination of exhibition objects and film images that a specific object or image can be interpreted (ibid., 37).

Juxtaposition of content lies at the core of the production of meaning in the networked structure of YouTube SERPs. Social media emulates how contrast and comparison of content are crucial to meaning generation in television, cinema and museums. YouTube further aligns with museum exhibitions through the ways that its SERPs feature and distribute representations of museum objects. SERPs function as digital exhibitions, in which the meaning of a museum object is ascertained through its intersection with a mesh of content, including keywords, metadata, thumbnail images and video content (Pietrobruno 2021). The narratives of a given museum object produced in relation to its networked context on YouTube are fragmented and open-ended. They are not classic stories with firmly established beginnings, middles and endings (Georgakopoulou 2016, 266). YouTube SERPs shift in accordance with constantly updated user-generated content, algorithms (including personalisation) and the platform’s business models. The narratives of museum objects displayed by SERPs are in flux and always in the middle of their storytelling. Neil Sadler (2017, 3277) has articulated the instability of narratives based on the fluctuating content on social media in the context of Twitter: “[T]he interpretations of individual readers may change greatly as the narrative wholes within which individual tweets are positioned shift and change.”

This theorisation of juxtaposition in generating museum object stories on YouTube’s fluctuating SERPs taps into meaning creation through the integration of diverse elements on websites (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 35), YouTube (Pietrobruno 2018), Twitter (Murthy 2011, 786; Sadler 2017, 3277) and Instagram (Bainotti et al. 2020, 2). Content on a SERP is juxtaposed as combinations of algorithmic automation and user-generated human intervention (Latour 2005). Search engine results are impelled by algorithms that are not fundamentally machine learning algorithms (Burrell 2016, 3). Rather, search engines make use of machine learning for particular tasks, including ranking items and hierarchising requests in accordance with user location (ibid.). As Jacob Ørmen (2016, 110) notes in his work on Google search, language and location are leading factors in personalisation, alongside a user’s address, gender, age and search history. Personalisation algorithms can access the location, address, gender and age of a given user when this user is logged in. If a user is not logged in, these identity markers can be inferred by the algorithms via the IP address, search history and similarly connected devices or via saved content, including passwords and contacts. This latter mode to access user information for the algorithms is less precise, as users can manipulate their IP address, including hiding it via a virtual private network (VPN) or via the Tor browser (Bischoff 2021). These personalisation signals, known to the algorithms through various channels, are potentially employed by YouTube’s search engine. Although conceived and produced by humans, algorithms can yield results that are not always predictable by humans (Kitchin 2017, 19). Yet algorithms are also created by humans, who inherit social biases, including racism and sexism (Noble 2018, 1–2, 9). Inherent problematics and unpredictability reinforce the “agency” of personalisation algorithms that employ machine learning to rank content on Google and YouTube. This algorithmic “agency” combines non-human with human intervention. Self-learning algorithms in the context of personalisation technology that incorporates machine learning can learn only in relation to the content and to the manner in which they were programmed to learn (Klinger and Svensson 2018, 4658). Furthermore, personalisation technology is impacted by search engine optimisation (SEO) implementations by content uploaders that can exert an influence in gaming personalisation algorithms. These SEO strategies include limiting the length of the video to an optimal duration of roughly ten minutes, using online tools to find the most effective keyword or keywords to identify a specific video, integrating the keyword or keywords into the video file, as well as into the video’s title, description and tags, and choosing a compelling thumbnail for the video (Buckle 2021). The work of personalisation technology combining human and machine intervention is part of how the platform’s SERPs “curate” the meaning of museum objects through juxtapositions.

The Swedish History Museum, the Viking Helmet and Media

Juxtaposition of content produces the semiotic values of the Viking helmet both in the former Viking exhibition (2001–2019) at the SHM and on YouTube’s shifting SERPs. The narratives produced in these contexts are rooted in the myths projected onto the Viking helmet, which do not necessarily reflect the ways helmets were used in the pre-Viking (c. 550–792 CE) and Viking (793–1066 CE) Ages. Such a disconnect emerges in part from the historical and archaeological uncertainty of the role of helmets in these eras. Notably, the Viking helmet, particularly its horned version, has served as a stand-in for the male, White warrior since the nineteenth century. Yet archaeological evidence does not support its widespread use with or without horns for combat or pillage during the Viking Age. Archaeological sources from this era have yielded just two images of horned helmets. One appears on the Oseburg “tapestry” that was part of the archaeological finds, along with a Viking ship burial mound, in a 1903 excavation in Oseburg, Norway (Djupdræt 2016, 191; Bloch-Nakkerud 2018, 18). The second was found on a ninth-century coin from Munich (Djupdræt 2016, 191). Drawing conclusions from these two finds, archaeologists and historians propose that the horned helmet might have been worn on special occasions only (ibid.). Archaeologists further contend that wearing helmets without horns during the Viking Age was an uncommon, if conceivable, occurrence (Ward 2001), as only one such object has been discovered from this era. Excavated on Gjermundbu farm close to Oslo, the reconstruction of this archaeological find, referred to as the Gjermundbu helmet, is exhibited at the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. The SHM has a copy of this helmet (Djupdræt 2016, 191) (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1
figure 1

Copy of the Gjermundbu helmet. Photo: Christer Åhlin SHM. Licenced under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0

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Several helmets dating from the pre-Viking Age, known as the Vendel Period, were found in the nineteenth century in ship burials at Vendel in Uppland, Sweden. Among the helmets featured in the SHM prehistory exhibition is the seventh-century ornate Vendel helmet, reconstructed in the 1940s by archaeologist Sune Lundqvist (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2
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The Vendel helmet (Decorated helmet). Photo: Christer Åhlin SHM. Licenced under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0

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Questions remain unanswered about whether this reconstruction reflects its original design and whether helmets from the Vendel Period were used in battle or for ceremonial purposes only (Andersson 2013, 74).

The section on the Viking helmet at the SHM was integrated into the former permanent Viking exhibition in 2009 by curator Petter Ljunggren in collaboration with Fredrik Svanberg. This section produces Viking helmet narratives through the juxtaposition of its objects, captions and texts. Meaning is then curated using techniques that mirror meaning production in cinematic montage. The display of helmet-themed objects juxtaposes images, material culture and texts related to the iconography of the helmet from the early nineteenth century to the 2000s. These juxtapositions convey the myths that have been bestowed upon the helmet in different times and spaces. Political uses of the Viking helmet in distinct eras and places are set against the object’s incorporation into children’s toys, films and artworks fashioned in diverse temporalities and geographies. This heterogeneous display produces hermeneutic fragments that contrast fantasy with reality, evoking the narrative production of television documentaries and the contrasting elements of cinematic montage.

In accordance with the exhibition’s preferred path of viewing the helmet section, the first image is a photograph of Swedish sculptor Bengt Erland Fogelberg’s 1866 gigantic statue of Odin, the Norse god of war and death. Donning a helmet with birds perched on its side to resemble a winged helmet, Odin is associated with violence. The second image is a poster of Swedish artist Mårten Eskil Winge’s painting of Thor, the Norse god of thunder, entitled Thor’s Fight with the Giants (1872), which characterises the god as a powerful blond-haired warrior. This depiction marks how Viking lore was used by Nazi Germany to promote the myth of Aryan racial superiority that justified the regime’s far-right nationalist politics. The third is a poster entitled “SS-Day 1943, 14–15 August, in Oslo German SS Norway” (English translation), which portrays a Schutzstaffel (SS) soldier in Nazi-occupied Norway dressed as a helmeted Viking. The image that follows is a promotional poster for the American film Pathfinder (2007), which features a colossal Viking warrior in a helmet with frightful horns. This advertisement reveals how warriors in Viking helmets are used in popular entertainment and culture. Next is an object illustrating the extent of Viking helmet imagery into the commercial realm of children’s toys. Displayed in a cabinet is the German company Playmobil’s 777 Viking Family toy from 2006, in which the father figure sports a diminutive horned helmet. The final image addresses contemporary political nationalist deployments of Viking helmets while coating its serious message in a light-hearted veneer. Above the cabinet hangs a portrait of a young Swedish woman with long brown hair and brown eyes donning a novelty Viking helmet with horns. In its representation of an ethnic identity, not traditionally identified with the Vikings, this final photograph challenges the conservative political use of Viking imagery to represent the stereotype of the male, blond, White warrior (Pietrobruno 2021). With the growth of nationalism in the 1990s, Swedish nationalist politicians, specifically the Swedish Democrats in 2003–2004, have been deploying Viking symbols to further their political aims (Bureychak 2013, 234; Pietrobruno 2021). This image hints at more extreme uses of Viking symbolism outlined in the museum’s communication materials. Fredrik Svanberg (2016, 16) discloses the troubling adoption of Viking symbolism by contemporary far-right extremist groups.

The significance of the Viking helmet in the permanent exhibition is hammered home through the temporal juxtaposition of the helmet section and the rest of the exhibition. The Viking helmet’s lack of relevance to the everyday lives of the people of the times is made apparent by the section’s proximity to the archaeological objects displayed in the exhibition. The narratives forged since the nineteenth century about Vikings and their helmets collide with stories surrounding the archaeological objects, which date back over 1000 years. The majority of these archaeological finds betoken everyday activities, including those pertaining to dress and adornment; cooking, drinking and eating; and personal hygiene. The warring aspects of the Viking Age are not overlooked, for the exhibition also displays martial objects, including swords for combat, fetters used for enslavement and silver hoards either obtained during pillaging or handed over as tribute to prevent further attacks (Andersson 2016a, 150–151). Nonetheless, the overriding narrative relates that most people in the Viking Age were peasants who spent their days labouring to survive. The meanings related to archaeological objects in the permanent exhibition erode the stereotypical representation of Viking society, exemplified by the male warrior, in which power was held only by men and obtained solely through violence. For instance, the featured display of symbolic keys provides evidence of women’s domestic rule and counters the absolute dominance of male authority. These keys, worn by affluent women over their clothes, signified their governance of the home and its extensive households (Andersson 2016c, 31). Other archaeological jewellery finds, including the permanent exhibition’s signature large twin oblong brooches, are testaments to wealthy women in the Viking Age holding high-status ranks.

The SHM permanent exhibition is expanded into two international versions entitled We Call Them Vikings, which toured the world from spring 2012 to summer 2019. The two exhibitions were identical in regard to their design, thematic content and textual references. The objects exhibited in both were mainly original artefacts that were similar but not identical. Consequently, the texts pertaining to these objects differed in each exhibition. The first touring exhibition opened in Europe at the Drents Museum in the Netherlands on 1 May 2012. With more bookings coming from overseas a few years later, the Swedish History Museum decided to dedicate this first exhibition to Australia and North America and produced the second version to tour in Europe. In lieu of the Viking helmet section outlined above, the touring exhibitions featured an interactive, hand-operated, mechanical device demonstrating the mythical origins of the horns on Viking helmets. This device is composed of a remake of the chain-mailed Gjermundbu helmet with eye holes in which two horns, attached together, are featured below the helmet. As museum visitors lift these horns, a shadow of a horned helmet appears on a screened backdrop (Ljunggren and Li 2016, 203) (Fig. 3.3)

Fig. 3.3
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Mythical horned helmet device for the SHM international touring exhibitions, We Call Them Vikings. Photo: Lasse Hedman/SHM. Licenced under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0

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This ephemeral, visitor-generated image stands in contrast to the touring exhibitions’ archaeological finds, which do not feature horned helmets (Pietrobruno 2021). The touring exhibitions were accompanied by a book claiming that the stereotyped martialism of the Viking Age was just one aspect of life during this era (Price 2016, 174). Available for purchase at the SHM bookstore, this book, entitled We Call Them Vikings (Andersson 2016b), also serves to contextualise the display of helmets and other Viking and pre-Viking objects at the museum.

Personalisation, Museum Curation and Search Engine Result Pages

The meanings associated with the helmet section ascertained through its juxtaposition with the archaeological finds in the SHM permanent exhibition and international exhibitions convey the museum’s dominant message: the representation of Vikings as violent male warriors who wore helmets in battle is a stereotype that cannot be supported by archaeological evidence. Creating an overriding narrative that connects disparate objects on display through juxtaposition is a tactic that designers use to give exhibitions an overall understanding of the objects that is congruous and consistent (Henning 2020b, xli). Designers depend on the museum visitors to complete the narrative in order to ascertain the preferred meaning of the exhibition (ibid.; den Oudsten 2012, 21). Audiences may, however, interpret a museum exhibition—in this case, the juxtaposition of the Viking helmet in relation to the diverse elements of the permanent exhibition—in ways that differ from the preferred narrative of the designers and curators (Jones 2005, 36). This shift in meaning can also occur since museumgoers are not compelled to follow the preferred viewing path that the museum designer directs them to take. The overall meaning conveyed in an exhibition has the potential to change according to the way that museum spectators move through a particular exhibition or between exhibitions. As museumgoers personalise their viewing path, they reassemble the organisation of museum objects, creating new juxtapositions that forge narratives that can diverge from the objects’ sanctioned meanings. The exhibition’s centralised curation of meaning through the processes of juxtaposition, which parallel cinematic montage, is challenged if viewers do not follow the set path, but instead choose their own route and customise their visit. Stephen Greenberg (2005, 230) notes that “because the exhibition is conceived as a ‘film in space’ rather than a film in two dimensions, each visitor can explore and edit at their own pace and in their creative space” (cited in Higgins 2020, 316).

The shift of meaning via the customised viewing sequences of museumgoers is heightened when museum objects circulate on personalised SERPs. The established interpretations given to objects within specific exhibitions, as the case of the Viking helmet illustrates, are displaced from the museum’s control and curated by YouTube’s algorithms, including its technologies of personalisation (Pietrobruno 2021). Search engine results on YouTube featuring images of Viking helmets in thumbnails and in video content are constantly fluctuating as streams of videos are personalised to individual users. Although it is the emerging media form of the present age, the personalised shifting SERP has not substantially impacted the way that the Viking helmet at the SHM has been displayed. Yet developments in exhibition design are beginning to emulate this medium. Citing Peter Higgins (2020, 322), Michelle Henning (2020b, xliv) identifies this recent trend: “From an exhibition design perspective, the potential of new media seems very exciting, with ‘individual profiling’ increasing the possibility of personalised content.” As outlined by John Bell and Jon Ippolito (2020, 487), that the self-organised museum involves curation to nurture the meaning of a disparate set of objects reflects the malleability of communication within the network and in turn counters a traditional format that generally utilises a single assemblage of materials. The content of online exhibitions might be regularly modified in accordance with user-centric practices. In discussing the future applications of a study on the relation between online collection portals and serendipitous exploration, John Coburn (2016) proposes, for instance, that online exhibitions could be more adeptly curated by employing user data to focus on those objects that are shown to receive prolonged user sessions and hence increased attention.

SERP Method

SERP personalisation not only evokes the agency of museumgoers who customise their chosen exhibition paths but also resonates with the self-organisation of curation in the diffused museum and with the potential for the exhibition of objects to shift in response to user data in future curation. Yet this process on SERPs is distinct, for it is produced through the constant interplay between user-generated content and the way that the platform’s personalisation algorithms target and integrate user communication and behaviour to monetise them. YouTube’s personalised SERPs take shape through the algorithmic deployment of users’ data accessed via their IP addresses. This information is also sold to third parties by Google for corporate profit. In light of the specific function and purpose of platform personalisation, the following method is used here to compare the established narratives of the helmet in the SHM exhibitions with the potential meanings that this object garners on fluctuating YouTube personalised SERPs. This method analyses SERPs as streams of content listed under a given search term (Pietrobruno 2021). Previous methods have concentrated only on the first three to five entries of SERPs in order to focus on the eye-tracking architecture, which influences where users cast their attention (Rogers 2013; Rieder et al. 2018). Recent research proposes that viewers often search farther down a SERP from the top results (Rogers 2018, 5). Infinite scrolling could be a factor in this shift in user attention (Pietrobruno 2021). Without pagination breaks, undivided searching through constant scrolling allows users to view hundreds of video thumbnails on a given SERP at the touch of a finger. As one of YouTube’s business-related technological models introduced in 2017, infinite scrolling further monetises user experience and communication. Google implemented this function aiming to ensure steady user engagement. Endless scrolls incite users to keep searching for a listing that they really want to look at and ensure that they will spend more time rummaging through a site (Sulleyman 2017). The importance of scrolling for monetising user preferences is further substantiated by a 2019 tweak in YouTube’s ranking algorithms that grants more weight to videos clicked by users that are tabulated farther down a SERP, which necessitates scrolling to access them (Hao 2019). The medium that serves as an index to capture the attention of user-scrolling eyes and fingers is the video thumbnail. This miniature image plays a pivotal role in the attention economy by enabling users to preview content (Thylstrup and Teilmann-Lock 2017). This method therefore analyses SERPs as ever-shifting streams composed of metadata and thumbnails, which are configured as navigational images in order to attract users to their corresponding videos (Pietrobruno 2021).

The method employed here is grounded in the way that the thumbnail stream of a given SERP becomes a medium in itself. To compare the historical narratives and meanings associated with the Viking helmet on personalised French-language YouTube SERPs with those put forward by the SHM, the following steps were undertaken. The French keywords “Musée historique de Suède et les Vikings”—which translate as “Swedish History Museum and Vikings”, the keywords used in the previous English-language study (Pietrobruno 2021)—establish a connection between the Viking helmet narratives at the SHM and those on French-language YouTube SERPs. Besides these selected keywords, no further customisation of YouTube search filters was used, such as upload date, view count or length of video. This methodology and its concomitant results are based upon a simple YouTube search rather than an advanced one. The streams of content from the French keywords were scanned to select static and animated thumbnails depicting helmets in the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). The thumbnail images featuring helmets on the SERPs obtained via the designated keywords were monitored at 3:00 p.m. from 4 March to 4 April 2020 on two computers: one employing the Google Chrome browser to personalise the search findings to my home office IP address in order to target my customised data set as the main researcher and the other running the Tor Browser, which constantly relocates the search site to different IP locations. The Tor Browser anonymises users’ web traffic by repeatedly resituating their communication around a distributed network of relays administered by volunteers positioned throughout the globe, in order that the geographic site of users obtained via their IP addresses cannot be determined. Establishing a correlation between the Tor Browser and the personalised browser enabled a comparison between the results to ascertain how SERPs personalise historical narratives. Narratives gathered on each browser were generated through a close analysis of the identified thumbnails. Stories from the SERPs of each browser were shaped by the juxtaposition of each thumbnail’s helmet-related iconography with its corresponding video content. The narratives that were yielded on each browser are compared here to those pitched by the SHM.

The YouTube helmet stories obtained by this method are interpreted through the prism of fieldwork conducted at the SHM in 2018, which included intermittent visits to the permanent exhibition and discussions with the head of the museum, Katherine Hauptman. The narratives that were gleaned are also interpreted through fieldwork that was conducted from 23 to 29 October 2018 on the touring exhibition at France’s Historical Museum of Nantes in the Château des ducs de Bretagne, held from 16 June to 18 November 2018. This work involved guided and personal visits to the touring exhibition, as well as meetings and discussions with participants of its communication plan, including the head of communications, Marie Lefevre. This fieldwork is interpreted here through historical and archaeological scholarship on the Viking Age.

Research Results: The Tor Browser

This list of videos featuring Viking helmet thumbnails tracked on 4 April 2020 at 3:00 p.m. serves as an example of the method used to compare the personalisation of historical narratives of the helmet on YouTube SERPs with their preferred narratives at the SHM. The following is a tabulation of videos with helmet thumbnails using the Tor Browser, which is not personalised to my IP address. Sixty videos were tracked to coincide with the same number of videos identified in the earlier study undertaken with English-language keywords (Pietrobruno 2021). The listed video numbers refer to the individual rank of thirteen videos with Viking helmet thumbnails from the top of a SERP stream of sixty videos obtained using the previously noted keywords. (Table 3.1)

Table 3.1 Tor Browser
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Below is a description of the Viking helmet thumbnail of each numbered video tabulated above.

  1. 1.

    The thumbnail of “The Vikings in Nantes” by Astraer (2018), a French-language cultural channel, features a map of Nantes as the background while foregrounding a Viking dragon ship on one side. On the other is a segment from the Nantes Cathedral’s 1852 painting by Edouard Jolin entitled The Martyrdom of St. Gohard (Le Martyr de St. Gohard), which portrays a Viking warrior in a helmet ready to kill the Bishop of St Gohard during the Norsemen attack of Nantes in 843 CE.

  2. 2.

    The second image of the thumbnail GIF of “The Age of the Vikings (with Nota Bene)” by L’histoire par les cartes (2016), a user-generated animated cartographic channel of historical subjects, depicts the SHM Vendel helmet above an axe on the left side, fur, amber and a slave fetter in the top right corner, and the dragon head of a Viking ship in the lower right corner, all set against a backdrop of a map of Scandinavia.

  3. 3.

    The second image of the animated thumbnail GIF of “They Changed the World—The Vikings” by n4v08k5 (2017), a history documentary channel affiliated with Science Grand Format, a popular science programme broadcast on the public television channel France 5, reenacts Vikings in battle gear, including helmets, attacking the monastery at Lindisfarne (England) in 793 CE, the first Viking attack in the Anglo-Saxon world.

  4. 4.

    The thumbnail of “Vikings at the Canadian Museum of History [1]” by the Musée canadien de l’histoire (2015c) features, against the backdrop of falling snow, a blue-eyed male Viking warrior in a fur-collared cape wearing a nasal metal helmet with a projecting nose-protection bar and holding a staff (Fig. 3.4).

Fig 3.4
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Vikings at the Canadian Museum of History, uploaded by the YouTube channel, Canadian Museum of History (courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History)

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This representation served as the promotional poster for one of the SHM international touring exhibitions, We Call Them Vikings at the Canadian Museum of History from 3 December 2015 to 17 April 2016.

  1. 5.

    The thumbnail of “At the Heart of History: The Vikings (Full Story)” by Europe 1 (2018), a private radio station in France, depicts on the right the Norse explorer Erik the Red (c. 950–1003 CE), founder of the first settlement in Iceland, in anachronistic European battle gear, including a helmet taken from the woodcut frontispiece of Icelandic scholar Arngrímur Jónsson’s (1568–1648) book Gronlandia (Greenland) (1688), and on the left a photograph of Franck Ferrand, a French writer and radio personality specialising in history.

  2. 6.

    The second image of the thumbnail GIF of “The Secrets of the Vikings—First Raid in England,” produced by the French television channel RMC Découverte and uploaded by the channel Documentaire monde (2018), features a historical reenactment of the Viking raid of 793 CE on the Lindisfarne monastery by helmet-clad warriors carrying shields and axes.

  3. 7.

    The first thumbnail of “French Documentary—The Conversion of the Vikings” by Documentary HD (2018), a user-generated documentary channel, features a gigantic male Viking warrior flanked by two others in helmets and battle gear. The central figure holds his helmet in one arm and a huge axe in the other. The second animated thumbnail showcases a helmet-clad Viking warrior with a sword and shield as he charges in the video’s reconstruction of the attack of 793 CE on the Lindisfarne monastery.

  4. 8.

    The thumbnail of “7 Unusual Facts about the VIKINGS” by Doc Seven (2017), a fun educational channel, foregrounds the cartoon male figure of Doc Seven against the background of two Viking ships and an ominous armour-clad warrior with a shield and helmet.

  5. 9.

    The thumbnail of “Norway, Lofoten Islands, the Viking Museum in Borg, Vestvagy Island” by joelyvon (2016), a user-generated travel slideshow channel, features on the left a promotional Viking reconstruction photograph by Svein Spjelkavik of a sinister warrior in a chain-mailed helmet with a front guard protecting the face and on the right the exact photo featured in a promotional poster used to advertise the Lofotr Viking Museum’s interactive exhibition Meet the Vikings.

  6. 10.

    The thumbnail of “Nantes: The Vikings, an Unprecedented Exhibition in France Far from the Clichés” by France 3 Pays de la Loire (2018), a Nantes-based branch of the national public programme company France Télévisions, depicts the previously described interactive mechanical device in the SHM touring exhibition consisting of a remake of the copy of the Gjermundbu helmet with two prominent horns on either side of it. The thumbnail of this device is an image taken from the SHM touring exhibition held at the Historical Museum of Nantes in the Château des ducs de Bretagne from 16 June to 18 November 2018.

  7. 11.

    The thumbnail of “The True Nature of the Vikings: Myth or Reality No. 4”, produced by Musée canadien de l’histoire (2015b) for the SHM touring exhibition, features a historical reconstruction of a Viking couple in which a woman stands next to a seated virile man. Dressed in a purple and gold shirt, he dons a remake of the SHM copy of the Gjermundbu helmet. Dressed in Viking style, she wears necklaces containing ornate oblong twin brooches fastened to her clothing.

  8. 12.

    The thumbnail of “Vikings at the Canadian Museum of History [2]”, produced by Musée canadien de l’histoire (2015d) for the SHM touring exhibition, features a fierce warrior dressed in battle gear, including a grim helmet with a face mask, who is standing on a ship against the backdrop of a dark sky and a threatening sea. Close-ups of the vessel in the video emphasise its Viking signature dragon figurehead.

  9. 13.

    The thumbnail of “The True Nature of the Vikings: Myth or Reality No. 3”, produced by Musée canadien de l’histoire (2015a) for the SHM touring exhibition, features a historical-reconstructed image of a broad-chested man dressed as a Viking warrior in a remake of the SHM copy of the Gjermundbu helmet.

When the helmet thumbnails above are analysed in correspondence with their videos, an overall narrative of the selected content of the given SERP emerges. First, an in-depth reading of each video and its thumbnail conveys how its narrative structure reflects the television documentary’s integration of fantasy and reality, as well as the mismatch of time periods that are integral to the Viking helmet section and its relation to the archaeological objects in the permanent exhibition. All thirteen videos combine historical and archaeological “facts” about Vikings with contemporary imagined and fanciful depictions of Vikings in their thumbnail images. For example, “The True Nature of the Vikings: Myth or Reality No. 3” (Musée canadien de l’histoire 2015a) features in its static thumbnail and fifteen-second video a historically reconstructed scene of a broad-chested man dressed as a Viking warrior in a remake of the SHM copy of the Gjermundbu helmet. The male voiceover notes that the supposedly “rough”, “slovenly” and “savage” (my translation) Vikings were in fact known for their excellent hygiene. To challenge the misconceptions that Viking men were crude and unkempt, this video playfully reenacts a male Viking combing his beard and announces that combs and razors were found in archaeological excavations . These finds are displayed in the permanent and touring exhibitions.

An in-depth reading of each video in juxtaposition with its thumbnail also highlights the way that the featured historical narratives can be viewed in relation to the SHM preferred narratives. The thirteen videos listed above can be grouped into two categories. In Category 1 are three videos that present the Vikings as merely brutal male warriors, which is contrary to the SHM depiction: “The Vikings in Nantes” (Astraer 2018); “The Age of the Vikings (with Nota Bene)” (L’histoire par les cartes 2016); and “7 Unusual Facts about the VIKINGS” (Doc Seven 2017). For instance, “The Age of the Vikings (with Nota Bene)” is a historical account of the military conquests of the Vikings and their looting, colonising and trading, including their slave trade. From its opening description of the Vikings as “dreaded warriors” (my translation), this video focuses exclusively on the conquering side of the Vikings, diverging from the SHM depiction.

In Category 2 are the remaining ten videos, which share the common trait of offering a more comprehensive depiction of each video’s correspondence to archaeological and historical evidence . These videos provide a richer perspective on Viking life than that proposed in their thumbnails, which portray Vikings as brutal, White, male warriors. In this way, the videos in this category align to a certain extent with the SHM established narrative of the Viking Age. For instance, “The Secrets of the Vikings—First Raid in England” (Documentaire Monde 2018) does not seek to glorify the brutality of the Viking raids. The featured scholar, Neil Price, states in an interview that “there is nothing to admire” (my translation) about the Vikings. This pronouncement reiterates the overriding message of Price’s (2016, 175) chapter in the SHM exhibition book, where he stresses the destructive impact of Viking conquests. At the same time, the SHM perspective is countered by the animated thumbnails depicting helmet-wearing warriors and by the video’s sensationalising of Viking brutality through violent historically reconstructed battle scenes.

The other nine videos in Category 2 align with the SHM perspective by tempering to varying degrees their thumbnail stereotyping of Vikings as male warriors through an exploration of everyday peaceful and non-martial activities. For example, brief moments in “They Changed the World—The Vikings” (n4v08k5 2017) intersect with the SHM position. These instances spotlight how Vikings rarely wore helmets, and never horned ones, and emphasise that in their homelands they mostly lived not as warriors, but as fishermen, farmers and craftspeople. Yet the dominant message conveyed throughout this fifty-minute video and its thumbnail is a glorification of the combative and exploratory spirit of Viking expansion on the continent of Europe through battle, trade and expedition. Most of this video clearly runs counter to the SHM narrative.

Significantly, five videos in Category 2 counter the stereotype of Vikings as male warriors, exemplified by their thumbnails, by highlighting in varied ways the role of women in Viking society. These videos include “Vikings at the Canadian Museum of History [1]” (Musée canadien de l’histoire 2015c); “At the Heart of History: The Vikings (Full Story)” (Europe 1 2018); “French Documentary—The Conversion of Vikings” (Documentary HD 2018); “Nantes: The Vikings, an Unprecedented Exhibition in France Far from the Clichés” (France 3 Pays de la Loire 2018); and “The True Nature of the Vikings: Myth or Reality No. 4” (Musée canadien de l’histoire 2015b).

The SHM narrative of the role of women is reflected, for example, in “Nantes: The Vikings, an Unprecedented Exhibition in France Far from the Clichés” (France 3 Pays de la Loire 2018), a review of the SHM touring exhibition We Call Them Vikings held at the Historical Museum of Nantes in the Château des ducs de Bretagne from 16 June to 18 November 2018. This video challenges the characterisation of Vikings as barbarous, violent, male warriors, claiming that most people in the North were farmers. Male dominance is undercut by information obtained from the archaeological evidence that women accompanied men on sea journeys and managed homes. Women’s domestic leadership role is supported by their rank as guardian and wearer of the symbolic key, displayed in a close-up from the exhibition. This gendered portrayal reflects the marketing of the Historical Museum of Nantes’ mounting of the touring exhibition, which sought to sidestep the stereotyping of Viking society through the trope of a male warrior. The Nantes exhibition used as its signature image a lone slender Viking warrior, photographed from the back, who dons a helmet (without horns), armour and layered clothing. These visual details (Fig. 3.5) render the biological sex of the human figure indiscernible (personal communication with Marie Lefevre, 24 October 2018). The construction of Vikings as male warriors who wore horns on their helmets is nonetheless reinforced by the thumbnail of the touring exhibition’s mechanical horned-helmet device and by the video itself, which fails to mention that this object is designed to show visitors that horned helmets are essentially mythical objects.

Fig. 3.5
figure 5

Le Voyage à Nantes 2018 (The Journey to Nantes 2018) © Apapa Rosenthal & Atelier Shiroï—Photo: David Gallard & Tore Bjørn Stensrud

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Research Results: The Personalised Browser and the Impact of Language and Location

In this method, a comparison is drawn between the SERP accessed at 3:00 p.m. on 4 April 2020 on the Tor Browser with one obtained simultaneously with the same keywords on the Chrome browser, personalised to my Ottawa-based IP address, illustrating the impact of personalisation in search queries. The following is a tabulation obtained via the personalised browser. The listed video numbers refer to the individual rank of fifteen videos with Viking helmet thumbnails from the top of a SERP stream of sixty videos obtained using the previously cited keywords (Table 3.2).

Table 3.2 Personalised Browser
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All of the thirteen videos with Viking thumbnail images tabulated with the Tor Browser were featured on the SERP produced with the personalised browser, with the addition of two videos. This correlation in video content was also obtained in two previous studies contrasting the content of YouTube video streams ascertained through identical keyword search terms within these two browsers (Pietrobruno 2020, 2021). The research finding of similarity across browsers obtained in three studies overall suggests that different browsers produce generally similar streams of YouTube videos, with just a few variations, even if the ranking of the videos ascertained through each browser differs. This congruence in content could result from the platform’s current deployment of infinite scrolling, which is pitched to provide different users with a close set of videos tabulated in varied rankings within video streams generated by comparative user search patterns (i.e. identical keywords).

One of the two videos not featured on the Tor Browser in this study (see Table 2, Video 11) is an animation entitled “The Incredible History of the Vikings” (DARKAM 2016), whose thumbnail showcases a helmeted Viking slaying a dragon. This video and its thumbnail fit into Category 2 ascertained with the Tor Browser. The images balance the stereotypical depiction of Vikings as “ruthless warriors” who “made Europe tremble with fear” (my translations), with a more nuanced depiction to illustrate that the majority of Vikings were farmers, artists and merchants. Women’s leadership in managing extension farms is also highlighted. This video does not significantly distinguish the overall narrative of the personalised SERPs from that produced by the Tor Browser and the relation of these narratives to the one sanctioned by the SHM. The second video obtained exclusively through the personalised browser throughout the research month (see Table 2, Video 5), entitled “Vikings in Canada (Feat. Once Upon a Time)—Nota Bene #18” (Nota Bene 2016), focuses on the presence of Vikings in present-day Newfoundland a millennium ago. This video might have been exclusively targeted via personalisation algorithms to my Ottawa-based IP address because of its Canadian-related content. This last video shifts the narratives produced through the personalised browser to a certain, yet limited, degree by adding content that the algorithms may deem relevant to my Canadian-based IP address search as it relates to the link between Vikings and Canada. With the exception of this latter video, the narratives produced through the juxtaposition of content between personalised SERPs and the non-personalised Tor Browser are largely the same and were basically identical during the research month. Therefore, the narratives of these two browsers are almost parallel in how they relate to the SHM preferred story of the Vikings and the helmet.

A greater shift between the narratives ascertained by the two browsers did, however, result when this search was conducted with English-language keywords. The non-personalised or anonymous SERPs obtained via the Tor Browser produced a video that uses the Viking helmet as an emblem of its far-right political stance. This video did not appear on the personalised SERPs during the research period (Pietrobruno 2021). The relation between contemporary far-right individuals and groups and Viking symbolism did not surface in the tracking of Viking helmet thumbnails tabulated on YouTube personalised or anonymous SERPs ascertained through French-language keywords. This absence could be explained by the Viking helmet not being a part of the iconography used by the far-right in French-speaking locations in France and Quebec, where the SHM touring exhibitions were mounted and promoted on YouTube. With exceptions granted to the needs of a film, show or exhibition of a historical rendering, Article R645-1 of France’s Penal Code bans the wearing or exhibiting in public of a uniform, badge or emblem worn by individuals and organisations declared to have committed crimes against humanity (Gouvernement de la République française 2021). This article prohibits the use of Nazi symbolism, including Nazi Germany’s use of Viking imagery, as contemporary emblems for right-wing groups in France. The majority of far-right groups in Quebec do not use Viking symbolism. These groups include Atalante, La Meute, Storm Alliance and Fédération des Québécois de Souche (Morris 2018). The Soldiers of Odin, who use a horned Viking helmet as its emblem, do have a chapter in Quebec (Morris 2018). Founded in Finland in 2015, this anti-immigrant, White supremacist group has affiliated groups in Europe, Australia, the UK and various provinces in Canada (Wikipedia 2021). Therefore, the meaning and narratives of the helmet on YouTube SERPs, including its radicalisation, are impacted by the language in which the platform search is conducted and by the use of Viking iconography in the corresponding national or geographic context.

Conclusion

The SERP narratives of the Viking helmet, obtained through French keywords using the personalised browser and those accessed via the Tor Browser, may in time become more disparate, or more similar or more radical. SERPs are unstable media whose narratives are always in the process of becoming, as they have the potential to constantly transform and alter in accordance with user-generated content, algorithms (including personalisation) and YouTube’s business model. The tracking of the Viking helmet on YouTube conducted in French in combination with a previous study undertaken in English demonstrates that YouTube SERPs and their personalisation of historical narratives through language and location have the potential to continuously recontextualise museum objects depicted in thumbnails and videos. The display of objects in traditional museum exhibitions remains relatively constant over time, although visitors are free to self-curate their meaning through individualised viewing sequences. Museum curation is in the process of integrating the shifting nature of personalised search technology into exhibition designs. The link between museum display and contemporary search engine technology continues the tradition of museum exhibitions and their curation of meaning reproducing the media of their era. A future museum exhibition may be as unstable as the personalised SERPs of today’s social media, which produce customised narratives that are open-ended and in flux. Social media personalisation is geared towards monetising users and realising the business aims of platform owners. Personalisation algorithms are not necessarily designed to convey histories of museum objects in order to promote social justice, a key goal of the SHM and the predominant mandate of museums in this digital era (Pietrobruno 2021). The increased integration of search request customisation in future museums could be based upon drawing vast amounts of personal data from audiences whose members may have no control over their use (Henning 2020b, xliv). This potential transfer of audience data could have legal ramifications with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a regulation in EU law dealing with data protection and privacy in the European Union. Ethical issues are also at stake if curators and designers blindly emulate the tactics of social media to individualise the visitor experience by personalising the historical narratives of museum objects.