Network of Collaboration

HELDIG is a collaboration network in Digital Humanities research, education, and application.

Support for this is provided by advanced shared research and data infrastructures and tooling, as well as educational online materials that support researchers, students, and developers to utilize novel technological aids. The work is based on multi- and interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in humanities, social sciences, and computer scientists.

There are several ways to join the network, please have look at our Contact Info.

Inside University of Helsinki

Department of Digital Humanities

Personnel at HELDIG includes, via double affiliation, the Department of Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts. This department includes research areas such as digital humanities, language technology, cognitive science, and phonetics.

HELDIG Professors

Eight new (established in 2017) professor chairs in six faculties of the university are directly supported by HELDIG:

  1. Digital humanities and global interaction. Prof. Eetu Mäkelä
  2. Digital Social Science. Prof. Krista Lagus
  3. Digital Innovations and Consumer Society. Prof. Minna Ruckenstein
  4. Algorithmic Data Science for SSH Applications. Prof. Michael Mathioudakis
  5. Legal Research on Digitalization. Prof. Riikka Koulu
  6. Russian Big Data Methodologies. Prof. Daria Gritsenko
  7. Religion and the Digital World. Prof. Katja Valaskivi
  8. Big Data Learning Analytics. Prof. Petri Ihantola

When planning HELDIG, over sixty professors and senior researchers were identified working on Digital Humanities related topics in seven faculties of the university. Strengthening these actitivies through collaboration and coordination is a major goal of HELDIG. Some examples of DH related activities at UH are listed below, but there are many more:

Collaborating Universities

The core university collaborators in HELDIG are:

There are, however, also collaborations with other universities in Finland, EU, US, and beyond. The doors are open!

Of particular importance are the connections between researchers in humanities, social sciences, and arts, and computer scientists at UH, Aalto, and their joint research centre Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT).

Memory Organizations

We have been working together with museums, archives, libraries, and media organizations, including:

  • National Board of Antiquities, National Gallery, Espoo City Museum
  • National Archives, Finnish Literature Society SKS, The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland
  • National Library, Helsinki City Library, Public Libraries in Finland
  • National Broadcasting Company Yle

Public Organizations

For example, several Finnish ministries have been involved in our work, including Ministry of Education and Culture, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Transport and Communications.

Companies

We collaborate with companies, such as CSC – IT Center for Science, Nokia, Edita Publishing Ltd and many others.

Other Organizations

We also collaborate with various other organizations and movements, such as Open Knowledge Finland and Wikidata Finland.

People

In the following you find some pointers to people associated actively with HELDIG – Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities, but there are many more in the research groups of the professors and senior researchers listed, as well as in the HELDIG network in the large presented above.

Eero Hyvönen (director)

Semantic Computing, Web, and Linked Data

Eero Hyvönen is director of Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG) at the University of Helsinki and professor of semantic media technology at the Aalto University, Department of Computer Science, where he directs the Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) specializing on Semantic Web technologies and applications. A major recent theme (since 2001) in his research has been development of the national level semantic web infrastructure and its application in different areas. Eero Hyvönen has published over 400 research articles and books and has got several international and national awards. He acts in the editorial boards of Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, Semantic Computing, International Journal of Metadata, Semantics, and Ontologies, and International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, and has co-chaired and acted in the programme committees of tens of major conferences.

Homepage: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/u/eahyvone/

Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo): https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/

Publications: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/u/eahyvone/publications/index.php

Jouni Tuominen (coordinator)

Jouni Tuominen is a university researcher at Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) and Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG), University of Helsinki, and a staff scientist at Department of Computer Science, Aalto University. He received his D.Sc. (Tech.) at Aalto University in 2017, with a dissertation titled "Ontology Services for Knowledge Organization Systems". He received his M.Sc. at University of Helsinki in 2010. His research interests include ontology repositories and services, linked data publishing methods, ontology models for legacy data, and tooling for digital humanities. He has published over 90 research articles since 2007, and has received several national and international awards. He has acted in programme committees of international conferences and workshops, and as a reviewer in scientific journals. He has collaborated with museums, libraries, and archives on their collection cataloging and cultural heritage data publishing processes since 2007.

http://seco.cs.aalto.fi/u/jwtuomin/

Lauri Carlson (prof)

Translation technology

Homepage: http://www.helsinki.fi/~lcarlson/

Daria Grit­senko (prof)

Russian Big Data Methodologies

Homepage: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/dgritsen/

Timo Honkela (prof)

So­cio-Cog­nit­ive Sys­tems

Socio-Cognitive Systems research uses computational methods to increase understanding of complex phenomena related to humanities and social sciences. The work takes place in interdisciplinary collaboration. This research is lead by Timo Honkela, Research Director, Adjunct Professor. He has a long experience on research of machine learning and neural networks and their applications in linguistics, cognitive science and sociology.

A central research topic is based on the hypothesis that different forms of artificial intelligence (machine learning, natural language processing, patterns recognitions, etc.) can be used in dealing with complex societal challenges such as excessive inequality, physical and psychological violence, dealing with climate change, and problems in interdisciplinary and intercultural communication. The work is divided into a number of interventions the effects and results of which can be studied with scientific means, conducted in interdisciplinary collaboration.

University of Helsinki Research Portal:

https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/en/persons/timo-honkela(2c6425cd-0cdb-4775-987c-6f3bfe9e96a5).html

Research group NLP in the Humanities:

https://blogs.helsinki.fi/language-technology/hi-nlp/humanities/

Timo Honkela among 375 Humanists:

https://375humanistia.helsinki.fi/en/humanists/timo-honkela

Dialogue of a million people, in relation to the Peace Machine concept (CMI, 2017)

http://cmi.fi/2017/04/12/dialogue-million-people-finnish-professor-envis...

Petri Ihantola (prof)

Big Data Learning Analytics

University of Helsinki Research Portal:

https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/fi/persons/petri-ihantola(84010d47-7379-4999-9901-c0f47c8d6a84).html

Riikka Koulu (prof)

Legal Research on Digitalization

University of Helsinki Research Portal: https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/en/persons/riikka-koulu(0bc23954-98fc-409f-963c-d5bebb0edbfa).html

Krista Lagus (prof)
Mi­chael Ma­th­iouda­kis (prof)

Com­pu­ta­tional So­cial Science

Michael Mathioudakis is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. He conducts research in the area of computational social science and has worked on trend detection on social media, social network analysis, urban computing, political polarization on the Web, and fair-algorithm design. His research combines empirical data analysis of user activity on the Web, as well as the development of algorithms for big, complex graphs, with an application on social network analysis. He serves as program committee member or reviewer for leading data mining and data management venues (TKDE, SIGKDD, PVLDB, IEEE ICDE, etc).

Homepage: www.michalis.co

Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship. WWW 2018. With K. Garimella, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Gionis. Covered on CNET, Le Monde. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3186139

Local Discrepancy Maximization on Graphs. TKDE 2017. With A. Gionis, A. Ukkonen.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7476870

Eetu Mäkelä (prof)

University of Helsinki

Professor (tenure-track) in Humanities-Computing Interaction

http://iki.fi/eetu.makela

Minna Ruck­en­stein (prof)

Digital Innovations & Consumer Society

University of Helsinki Research Portal: https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/en/persons/minna-ruckenstein(d36572db-6125-436a-9a03-18151037b637).html

Jörg Tiedemann (prof)

Language Tech­no­logy

Jörg Tiedemann is professor of language technology at the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki. He received his PhD in computational linguistics for work on bitext alignment and machine translation from Uppsala University before moving to the University of Groningen for 5 years of post-doctoral research on question answering and information extraction. His main research interests are connected with multilingual data sets and data-driven natural language processing and he maintains OPUS, the World's largest collection of freely available parallel corpora.

Personal Homepage: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/tiedeman/

LT Research Group: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/language-technology/

UH Research Profile: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/jörg-tiedemann

Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=j6V-rOUAAAAJ

Mikko Tolonen (prof)

University of Helsinki

Professor of research on digital resources; an intellectual historian who works in the field of digital humanities.

http://375humanistia.helsinki.fi/humanistit/mikko-tolonen

Martti Vainio (prof)
Katja Valaskivi (prof)

Religion and the Digital World

University of Helsinki Research Portal: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/katja-riitta-maria-valaskivi

Roman Yangarber (prof)

Linguistic Inequalities and Translation Technologies

University of Helsinki Research Portal: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/roman-yangarber

Otto Lappi

Cognitive Science

Homepage: http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/olappi/

Kris­ter Lindén

Re­source de­vel­op­ment for a di­gital hu­man­it­ies in­fra­struc­ture

Krister Lindén is national coordinator for FIN-CLARIN, which is the Finnish node of CLARIN – the European research infrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is director of the Language Bank of Finland and research director of Language Technology at the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki, where he directs research groups on lexical semantics, corpus processing and language technological applications. An important theme since 2008 has been the development of a contractual framework for sharing language resources through an EU-wide research infrastructure in view of on-going EU reforms of the copyright and personal data protection legislation. Krister Lindén has published more than 100 research articles. He is vice-chair of the National Coordinators Forum of CLARIN and chair of the CLARIN Strategic and Management Board.

Homepage: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/krister-linden

Kielipankki – the Language Bank of Finland: https://www.kielipankki.fi/

FIN-CLARIN: https://www.kielipankki.fi/organisaatio/

CLARIN: https://www.clarin.eu/

Jo­hanna Kont­tori

Dr. Johanna Konttori is Sociologist of Religion, working at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Theology. Her research interests include Muslims in Europe, discursive construction of national identity, and more lately, religious literacy. As a researcher, she is an experienced user of online data, and as a teacher, of e-learning programs and applications. Konttori is one of the Editors-in-Chief of Katsomukset.fi, an online science communication project, and a core member of the Argumenta-project on religious literacy ("Uskontolukutaito moniarvoisessa yhteiskunnassa", 2019–2020).

Homepage: https://konttori.wordpress.com/

Publications: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/da912c5a-476e-490e-9620-736e6760d…

Leo Lahti

University of Turku - University of Helsinki - VIB/KULeuven, Belgium

Docent in applied mathematics & Academy research fellow 2016-2021. Co-founder of the OKF Open Science work group. 

Statistical machine learning, bioinformatics, and digital humanities.

http://www.iki.fi/Leo.Lahti

Anna Kajander

University of Helsinki

Doctoral student in ethnology studying e-books and new reading practices. Interested in the impacts of new technologies to book culture and how these impacts are received and experienced by readers.

Emily Öhman

University of Helsinki

Doctoral student in Language Technology who wants to develop computational tools for scholars in the humanities to better access and analyze the hidden knowledge in underexplored datasets.

Antti Kanner

University of Helsinki

Doctoral student in Finnish language and corpus linguistics studying semantic and conceptual changes and polysemy.

Maija Paavolainen

Helsinki University Library

Information specialist interested in open digital cultural heritage, teaching students and the occasional theoretical debate Maija works with a network of cultural heritage institutions and libraries.

Inés Matres

University of Helsinki

Doctoral student in ethnology investigating practices that appear from teaching and learning heritage-related subjects using digital resources in upper-secondary education. Interested in understandings of digital cultural heritage.

https://learningstories.wordpress.com/

Erik Henriksson

University of Helsinki

Doctoral student in Classical Philology exploring the metrics and phonology of late antique Greek poetry using a computational approach to analyse texts in a large scale. Also developing a public database of Ancient Greek Metrics (AGMDb).

Ylva Grufstedt

University of Helsinki

Doctoral student whose primary interests are different kinds of uses of history in the present. Her PhD project is a study on counterfactual scenarios and experimental history in simulation computer games.

Salla-Maaria Laaksonen

Salla-Maaria Laaksonen (D.Soc.Sc.) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on communication, technology and organizations, often with social media data. Salla-Maaria is also the chair or Rajapinta ry, a scientific association of digital social sciences.



Homepage: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/smlaakso/

Rajapinta: https://rajapinta.co

Jukka Suomela

Aalto University

Assistant professor in computer science, working on algorithms and theory of computing, with the main focus on distributed and parallel computing. Interested in algorithmic challenges arising from e.g. linguistic research questions.

Tanja Säily

University of Helsinki

Postdoctoral researcher at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), Department of Modern Languages. Interested in multidisciplinary collaboration on developing tools and methods for the study of language variation and change in its sociocultural contexts.

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng/tanja-saily

Minna Tamper

Working on the WarSampo and Severi projects.

Homepage

Arttu Oksanen

Working on Severi and Semantic Finlex projects.

Mikko Koho

University of Helsinki

Postdoctoral researcher