Digital Humanities Research Seminar

Information about Helsinki Digital Humanities Research Seminar
Spring 2025 Schedule

Thursdays at 16:15-18:00 (time in Finland = EEST/EET time zone)

  • 02.10 – Ville Vaara (helsinki): Is There Meaningful Use for Generative AI in Studying History? Prototyping Research Augmented Generation (RAG) With Historical Corpora

  • 16.10 – Lidia Pivovarova (Helsinki): Normalisation and Translation of Finnic Oral Poetry with LLMs

  • 30.10 – Ruilin Wang (Helsinki): Scaling Up Book History: A Computational Investigation of 18th-Century Book Ornaments from Manual Catalogues to Automated Discovery

Place: Metsätalo, Lecture Hall 17 and Zoom (unless otherwise noted)

If you want to participate in-person, come to Metsätalo, Lecture Room 17 unless otherwise noted. You can also take part on Zoom (unless otherwise noted).
Meeting ID: 671 1257 5191
Passcode: 123123.

Updates and possible changes will be noted in due course. The seminar is open. If you want to join our mailing list, need credits, or have any questions about the seminar, write to Mikko Tolonen.

And, as always, all welcome!
Previous terms (2015-)

Spring 2025

  • 6.2. Meet-and-greet-coffee (NB! Place, Metsätalo, a-wing, floor 1 coffee room -- all welcome!)
  • 20.2. Arianna Moretti (Bologna/Helsinki): Bibliographic Resource Mapping and Deduplication: the OpenCitations and the BnF to ESTC Case Studies
  • 13.3. Peeter Tinits (Leipzig/Tartu/Helsinki): Towards comparative evolutionary studies on bibliographic data: key challenges and preliminary explorations
  • 27.3. Iiro Tiihonen (Helsinki): A Large-Scale Analysis of the Convolutions of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century Political Discourse
  • 10.4. Matti La Mela and Yunting Xie (Uppsala): From Invention to Innovation: Natural Language Processing to Study Swedish Historical Patents (1890—1945)
  • 8.5. Ville Vaara (Helsinki): Networks of Enlightenment Histories in Britain

Autumn 2024

  • 5.9. Coppélie Cocq (Umeå University): Huminfra – Advancing Research Infrastructures for the Humanities in Sweden (and Beyond)
  • 26.9. Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä): Onomasiological and semasiological methods for the conceptual history of representative democracy
  • 31.10. Lari Ahokas (Helsinki): Studying Manuscript Transmission of Medieval Texts with Network Analysis of Bibliographical Data: The Case of Polemical Texts of the Investiture Contest (ca. 1076–1122)
  • 14.11. Corinna Coupette (Aalto): The Anatomy of Legal Argumentation: Harnessing Higher-Order Networks to Trace the Development of Doctrine (abstract and bio)
  • 28.11. Ari Vesalainen (Helsinki/Turku), Filip Ginter (Turku) and Jenna Kanerva (Turku): Handwritten Text Recognition Pipeline for Finnish Tabular Data, 1800-1920

Spring 2024

  • 25.1. Lily Diaz-Kommonen: Designing VR and Semantic Tools for Social Cohesion using Citizen Curation
  • 8.2. Peeter Tinits: Adapting newspaper and bibliographic data for historical research: tools and case studies in Estonia (slides)
  • 14.3. Thea Lindquist et al.: Let everything be of use? — Analysing the publication activity of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617–1680) through the VD17 library catalogue
  • 28.3. Kira Hinderks: Text reuse as a political act: Rhetoric and satire in eighteenth-century British utopian thinking
  • 11.4. Ville Vaara: Publishers, Printers and Booksellers in 18th century Britain. Recreating a book trade network from library catalogue data

Autumn 2023

  • 21.9. Emily Öhman: Affective Datafication of Narratives: measuring affect, emotion, and mood in literary texts
  • 5.10. Saara Kekki: A Community in Motion: Reassessing Japanese American Resettlement through Geospatial Network Analysis
  • 19.10. Eleanor Bennett: The exploring embodied emotions in an Akkadian corpus
  • 2.11. Narges Azizifard: Wiki Loves Monuments: crowdsourcing the collective image of the worldwide built heritage
  • 23–24.11. International Workshop on Text Reuse (see: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/quantitative-text-reuse-2023/)
  • 14.12. Lily Diaz-Kommonen Designing VR and Digital Tools for Cultural Heritage to Promote Social Cohesion

Spring 2023 

  • 26.1. Jani Marjanen (UH): Separation, Continuity or Asymmetry? Studying Textual Overlaps in Nineteenth-Century Swedish and Finnish Newspapers
  • 9.2. Giles Bergel (Oxford): Humanist in the Loop: Computer Vision by Example for the Study of Early Printed Books
  • 2.3. Ari Vesalainen (UH): Page Layout Analysis for Eighteenth-Century Printed Texts
  • 16.3. Risto Turunen (UH): Deep Breadth: Towards a Theory of Text Mining in Digital History
  • 30.3. Margherita Fantoli (Leuven), Jukka Suomela (Aalto), Mikko Tolonen (UH) et al.:  The Presence of Classics in Early Modern Book History -project
  • 27.4. Pihla Toivanen, Antti Kanner and Eetu Mäkelä (UH): Insights into Developing Analytical Categorization Schemes for Use in the Social Sciences and Humanities
  • 11.5. Anna Sendra Toset (Tampere): Evidence-Based Research Infrastructure Development: Understanding the Needs and Expectations of Social Sciences and Humanities Researchers in Finland

Autumn 2022 

  • 22.9. Tony McEnery (Lancaster): Keywords, Clustering, Discourse and Time
  • 6.10. RiCEP project (UH): Rise of Commercial Society and Eighteenth-Century Publishing
  • 20.10. Maciej Janicki (UH): Text similarity in Finnic oral folk poetry: towards a large-scale quantitative analysis (slides)
  • 3.11. Viivi Lähteenoja (UH) and Kimmo Karhu (Aalto): The Virtuous Smart City: Bridging the Gap between Ethical Principles and Practices of Data-driven Innovation
  • 17.11. Iiro Tiihonen (UH): Discourses and Disposable Income: Data Driven Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Commercial Society
  • 1.12. Vojtěch Kaše (University of West Bohemia in Plzeň): Distributional semantics of ancient Greek and cultural evolution of moralizing religions

Spring 2022 

  • 17.2. Yann Ryan (UH): Mapping an early modern informant network using Named Entity Recognition in the ‘Networking Archives’ project, abstract
  • 3.3. Anne Järvinen and Ümit Bedretdin (UH): Developing research tools for the Flows of Power (FLOPO) project: MA student insights
  • 24.3. Mikko Kivistö (UH): Studying eighteenth-century popularity of the Spectator with computational methods
  • 7.4. Lassi Saario (UH): Conceptions of formal consequence in early modern Britain: A data-driven approach
  • 21.4. Sampo Pyysalo and TurkuNLP (UT): Large language models for small languages: towards a Finnish GPT-3
  • 28.4. Antti Arppe (University of Alberta): Finding words that aren’t there: Using word embeddings to improve dictionary search for low-resource languages; abstract

Autumn 2021 

  • 14.10. Antti Kanner (UH): Distributional operations, distributional structures and two studies in lexical semantics
  • 4.11. Aleksi Moine (UH): The study of Northern Karelian charms through social network analysis, abstract
  • 18.11. Anu Lahtinen (UH): #Ajanluku: Handwritten Text Recognition and 16th century society, abstract
  • 2.12. Ville Vaara (UH): Uncovering book trade actor networks in 18th-century Britain. Creating a structured historical dataset from incomplete information
  • 16.12. Aatu Liimatta (UH): The role of text length in functional variation on social media

Spring 2021

  • 21.1. Panu Heimonen (UH): Representations of culture in Mozart's piano concerto corpus: Search for the role of digital humanities (abstract)
  • 4.2. Veronika Laippala (University of Turku): Can news be automatically distinguished from opinions and why bother? Web genre identification and other ongoing projects at TurkuNLP
  • 18.2. Xenia Zeiler (UH): Developing Educational Video Games for Humanities Teaching
  • 18.3. Ruben Ros (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)): Modelling Technocratic Reasoning in Dutch and British Parliamentary Debates 1918-2018
  • 1.4.2020 Coppélie Cocq (UH): Digital research in Indigenous contexts: perspectives on data harvesting and practices of sharing (abstract)
  • 15.4. Timo Korkiakangas (UH): Documentary formulae as text reuse: the case of early medieval Latin charters
  • 29.4. Steven Coats (University of Oulu): Dialectology from YouTube videos

Autumn 2020 

  • 24.9. Joseph Flanagan (University of Helsinki): Wake Up It’s a #Plandemic: Covid-19 and Conspiracy Clique Communities on Twitter (abstract)
  • 8.10. Eetu Mäkelä, Maciej Janicki (University of Helsinki) and Kati Kallio (SKS) : Formulaic intertextuality, thematic networks and poetic variation across regional cultures of Finnic oral poetry
  • 29.10. Iiro Tiihonen (University of Helsinki): A Quantitative Analysis of the English Civil War Print Production
  • 12.11. Neha Sayed (Aalto): Analysing methodological artefacts for disciplinary bias (abstract)
  • 26.11. Emily Öhman (University of Helsinki): Multilingual sentiment analysis and emotion detection for DH
  • 10.12. Eljas Oksanen (University of Helsinki): GIS Research and Citizen Science Archaeology in England and Finland

Spring 2020

Autumn 2019

  • 19.9. Samu Niskanen and Lauri Leinonen (University of Helsinki): Authorial publishing in the middle ages
  • 3.10. Hannu Toivonen (University of Helsinki): Computational creativity
  • 17.10. Peeter Tinits (University of Tartu): Mining texts for social history: Research from spelling standardization to sustainability transitions
  • 31.10. Martti Vainio (University of Helsinki): New frontiers in phonetics and digital humanities
  • 14.11. Hannu Salmi (University of Turku): Digital Humanities and Media History: Perspectives and Experiences
  • 28.11. Neha Sayed (Aalto): 'Place' in Internet of Things & Daniel Landau (Aalto): Virtual Embodiment and the Transformation of the Self
  • Cancelled due to family reasons 12.12. Tanja Säily (University of Helsinki): Sociolinguistic variation in the history of English

Spring 2019

Autumn 2018

  • 13.9.2018 Jack Blumenau (University College London): Measuring Influence in Political Debate
  • 27.9.2018 Tanja Säily (University of Helsinki) & Mika Hämäläinen (University of Helsinki) & Eetu Mäkelä (University of Helsinki): Neologism detection in historical corpora
  • 11.10.2018 Aleksi Vesanto (University of Turku) & Mark Hill (University of Helsinki) and Helsinki Computational History Group: Anonymity and Ambiguity in Historical Texts: Methods in computational authorship attribution
  • 25.10.2018 Risto Turunen (University of Tampere): From Newspaper Data to Historical Knowledge: Quantifying Emotion Concepts in the Political Language of Finnish Socialism, 1895–1917
  • 7.-8.11.2018 UCLA DH Lab Workshop with Annelie Rugg & Anthony Caldwell (Separate programme)
  • 15.11.2018 Sara Budts (University of Antwerp): Mining the modals – on the benefits of Artificial Neural Networks for charting diachronic paradigm change. Abstract here.
  • 29.11.2018 Viivi Lähteenoja (University of Helsinki): Towards an ethics of personal data
  • 11.-12.12.2018 Does Intellectual History need Digital Humanities? -workshop, separate programme (see here).
  • 20.12.2018 Christmas porridge

Spring 2018

  • 18.1.2018 Mark Hill (University of Helsinki): The Public Sphere in the Eighteenth Century: Perspectives from intellectual history and the digital humanities (slides)
  • 1.2.2018 Kaius Sinnemäki (University of Helsinki): Linked data in language typology (abstract, slides)
  • 15.2.2018 Anna Kajander (University of Helsinki): Feeling the Format: Materiality in Contemporary Book Reading Habits
  • 1.3.2018 Simo Järvelä (University of Helsinki): Psychophysiological studies on digital media
  • 7.-9.3.2018 Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries Conference
  • 22.3.2018 Ilya Sverdlov (University of Helsinki): Getting digital on Viking Age poetry: work in progress on metrical syntax of complex noun phrases in Old Norse and Old English
  • 12.4.2018 Mila Oiva (University of Turku) & Matti La Mela (Aalto University): Thinking Out Loud: Approaches to digital analysis of practices
  • 26.4.2018 Teemu Roos (University of Helsinki): Spatio-temporal analyses of medieval calendar data

Autumn 2017

Spring 2017

  • 27.1.2017 Krister Lindén, Saana Svärd, Heidi Jauhiainen and Tommi Jauhiainen (University of Helsinki): Semantic domains in Akkadian texts
  • 10.2.2017 Urszula Pawlicka (Aalto Media Lab): Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections
  • 3.3.2017 Lassi Lager and Aija Vahtola (National Library of Finland): What web (archives) can offer for digihumanists
  • 17.3.2017 Anne Isomursu (University of Helsinki): Hierarchical information management of photographic collections: synthetic and natural archive units & Mila Oiva: Culture Analytics - Insights
  • 31.3.2017 Eric Malmi (Aalto University): Discourse Connective Prediction Using Neural Networks (see also https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00992) & Alexei Kouprianov (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies): Developing descriptive tools for a digital History of the Åbo Academy / University of Helsingfors in the Imperial Period (1809-1917): progress report and some preliminary findings
  • 21.4.2017 Erik Henriksson (University of Helsinki): Computing Metrical Variation in Ancient Greek Poetry
  • 12.5.2017 Ville Vaara (University of Helsinki): Encyclopaedic projects in the 18th and 21st centuries. Mapping the history of ideas through text reuse in ECCO (see also COMHIS Collective)
  • 16.6.2017 at 17.00 HelsinkiDH Summer party at Morphological archive (Muoto-opin arkisto) 4th floor of the Main Building of the University of Helsinki (Fabianinkatu 33). The Morphological archive is at the north end of the 4th floor corridor, at the “new side” of the main building. If you can join us for the seasonal party, please use this form to sign up.

Autumn 2016

Spring 2016

Autumn 2015

  • 30.10.2015 Antti Kanner, (HY, Finnish language), “A vagrant’s path: tracking the life cycle of a legal term in 19th century newspaper data”. Commentator: Timo Honkela (HY)
  • 13.11.2015 Ylva Grufstedt (HY, History), “The Practice of History in videogames – Historical culture and consciousness in digital and interactive media”. Commentator: Jaakko Stenros (Tampere)
  • 27.11.2015 Eric Malmi (Aalto, Computer Science), “Automatically Reconstructing and Analyzing Family Trees”. Commentator: Tiina Miettinen (UTA, History). [Discussion in Finnish because of genealogical terminology.]
  • 11.12.2015 Erik Henriksson (HY, Greek), “The Language and Meter of Late Greek Poetry: A Computational Approach”. Commentator: Timo Korkiakangas (HY)
  • 18.12.2015 Anna Kajander, (HY, Ethnology), “Digital book culture and the new reading habits”. Commentator: Harri Heikkilä (Aalto)