Digital Humanities Research Seminar

Information about Helsinki Digital Humanities Research Seminar

Autumn 2025 Schedule

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

02.10 – (Helsinki): Is There Meaningful Use for Generative AI in Studying History? Prototyping Research Augmented Generation (RAG) With Historical Corpora
16.10 – (Helsinki): Normalisation and Translation of Finnic Oral Poetry with LLMs
30.10 – (Helsinki): Scaling Up Book History: A Computational Investigation of 18th-Century Book Ornaments from Manual Catalogues to Automated Discovery
13.11 – and (Tallinn University): Quantifying Early Modern news flows with vision-capable LLMs?
20.11 - (University of Colorado Boulder) and (Helsinki): Creating a flexible and reproducible research data pipeline based on the German national bibliography for the seventeenth century
04.12 - HELDIG Summit 2025
- HELDIG, the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki, will host the HELDIG Digital Humanities Summit 2025 on Thursday 4 December 2025, from 12:00 to 18:00, followed by a cocktail. The aim of this afternoon event is to bring together Finnish digital humanities actors, infrastructures and partner organisations; to network, and to provide a snapshot of the field from diverse perspectives. The event is held in the honour of Eero Hyvönen, previous Director of HELDIG, and of his retirement.
- Representatives from universities, memory organisations, research communities and infrastructures throughout the country are widely expected to attend. Founded in 2015, HELDIG has established itself at the forefront of digitalization and digital humanities both nationally and internationally.
- You can click to see the programme.
- Please register until 28.11. to attend the summit in person.
- The participation is open to everyone and free of charge.
- Space is limited, and seats will be filled in the order of registration. So register soon!

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

Note! Due to renovation, the seminar on 02.10 will take place in Metsätalo B502, 5th floor, Building B. Zoom choice will remain the same as below.

If you want to participate in-person, come to Metsätalo, Lecture Room 17 unless otherwise noted. You can also take part on (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 or Ke Shu ().

And, as always, all are welcome!

Previous terms (2015-)

DH seminar programmes (2015-)

Spring 2025

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

Autumn 2024

5.9. (Umeå University): – Advancing Research Infrastructures for the Humanities in Sweden (and Beyond)
26.9. (University of Jyväskylä): Onomasiological and semasiological methods for the conceptual history of representative democracy
31.10. (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. (Aalto): The Anatomy of Legal Argumentation: Harnessing Higher-Order Networks to Trace the Development of Doctrine ()
28.11. (Helsinki/Turku), (Turku) and (Turku): Handwritten Text Recognition Pipeline for Finnish Tabular Data, 1800-1920

Spring 2024

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

Autumn 2023

21.9. : Affective Datafication of Narratives: measuring affect, emotion, and mood in literary texts
5.10. : A Community in Motion: Reassessing Japanese American Resettlement through Geospatial Network Analysis
19.10. : The exploring embodied emotions in an Akkadian corpus
2.11. : Wiki Loves Monuments: crowdsourcing the collective image of the worldwide built heritage
23–24.11. International Workshop on Text Reuse (see: )
14.12. Designing VR and Digital Tools for Cultural Heritage to Promote Social Cohesion

Spring 2023

26.1. (UH): Separation, Continuity or Asymmetry? Studying Textual Overlaps in Nineteenth-Century Swedish and Finnish Newspapers
9.2. (Oxford): Humanist in the Loop: Computer Vision by Example for the Study of Early Printed Books
2.3. (UH): Page Layout Analysis for Eighteenth-Century Printed Texts
16.3. (UH): Deep Breadth: Towards a Theory of Text Mining in Digital History
30.3. (Leuven), (Aalto), (UH) et al.: The Presence of Classics in Early Modern Book History -project
27.4. , and (UH): Insights into Developing Analytical Categorization Schemes for Use in the Social Sciences and Humanities
11.5. (Tampere): Evidence-Based Research Infrastructure Development: Understanding the Needs and Expectations of Social Sciences and Humanities Researchers in Finland

Autumn 2022

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

Spring 2022

17.2. (UH): Mapping an early modern informant network using Named Entity Recognition in the ‘Networking Archives’ project,
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. (UH): Conceptions of formal consequence in early modern Britain: A data-driven approach
21.4. Sampo Pyysalo and (UT): Large language models for small languages: towards a Finnish GPT-3
28.4. (University of Alberta): Finding words that aren’t there: Using word embeddings to improve dictionary search for low-resource languages;

Autumn 2021

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

Spring 2021

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

Autumn 2020

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

Spring 2020

30.1. (University of Helsinki): The "Flows of Power" () project: Integrating close reading, quantitative methods and a rich NLP pipeline ()
13.2. (University of Helsinki) and others: Cultural Studies in Digital Humanities. A roundtable discussion with , , and :
27.2. (Uppsala University): What was the ‘culture’ of cultural treaties?: Digital text analysis for the intellectual history of 20th-century international relations
12.3. (University of Jyväskylä): Participatory media in 18th century Sweden ()
26.3. at 16:15 (University of Helsinki), Reliability of image recognition to social science research - preliminary findings
23.4. at 16:15 (University of Helsinki): : New methods, digitized newspapers, and history
7.5. at 16:15 (University of Helsinki): Are Ancient Greek poetic meters metrical? Video:

Autumn 2019

19.9. and (University of Helsinki): Authorial publishing in the middle ages
3.10. (University of Helsinki): Computational creativity
17.10. (University of Tartu): Mining texts for social history: Research from spelling standardization to sustainability transitions
31.10. (University of Helsinki): New frontiers in phonetics and digital humanities
14.11. (University of Turku): Digital Humanities and Media History: Perspectives and Experiences
28.11. (Aalto): 'Place' in Internet of Things & (Aalto): Virtual Embodiment and the Transformation of the Self
Cancelled due to family reasons 12.12. (University of Helsinki): Sociolinguistic variation in the history of English

Spring 2019

31.1.2019 (University of Helsinki):
14.2.2019 (Aalto University):
18.02.2019, 13:00-17:00. DIFFERENT ROOM: Sali 6, Metsätalo. Workshop on Lexical Semantic Change. Speakers: (University of Gothenburg/Språkbanken), Haim Dubossarsky (University of Cambridge), (Universität Stuttgart). Details and registration .
28.2.2019 (University of Helsinki): Conceptions of Meaning in Semantic Vector Spaces
14.3.2019 (University of Helsinki):
4.4.2019 (Aalto University) and (University of Turku): Lab and Slack. Situated Research Practices in Digital Humanities
25.4.2019 (University of Helsinki):
2.5.2019 (University of Helsinki): Social media in Sápmi: public spaces or filter bubbles?

Autumn 2018

13.9.2018 (University College London): Measuring Influence in Political Debate
27.9.2018 (University of Helsinki) & (University of Helsinki) & (University of Helsinki): Neologism detection in historical corpora
11.10.2018 (University of Turku) & (University of Helsinki) and : Anonymity and Ambiguity in Historical Texts: Methods in computational authorship attribution
25.10.2018 (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 & ()
15.11.2018 (University of Antwerp): Mining the modals – on the benefits of Artificial Neural Networks for charting diachronic paradigm change. Abstract .
29.11.2018 (University of Helsinki): Towards an ethics of personal data
11.-12.12.2018 Does Intellectual History need Digital Humanities? -workshop, separate programme (see ).
20.12.2018 Christmas porridge

Spring 2018

18.1.2018 (University of Helsinki): The Public Sphere in the Eighteenth Century: Perspectives from intellectual history and the digital humanities ()
1.2.2018 (University of Helsinki): Linked data in language typology (, )
15.2.2018 (University of Helsinki): Feeling the Format: Materiality in Contemporary Book Reading Habits
1.3.2018 (University of Helsinki): Psychophysiological studies on digital media
7.-9.3.2018
22.3.2018 (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 (University of Turku) & (Aalto University): Thinking Out Loud: Approaches to digital analysis of practices
26.4.2018 (University of Helsinki): Spatio-temporal analyses of medieval calendar data

Autumn 2017

14.9.2017 Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (), Report and Impressions from University of Helsinki participants. Part I:
- Data science for the humanities (, , )
- Introduction to Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative ()
- Social humanities: citizens at scale in the digital age (, )
28.9.2017 Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School - Report and Impressions, Part II:
- Introduction to digital humanities , )
- Humanities data: hands-on approach(, Laura Aho, )
- From text-to-tech ()
12.10.2017 (History of Industrialization & Innovation Group, Aalto University): Text Trawling for Terrorisms: Research on Swedish Newspapers between Domesticated & Paradigmatic Digital History Methods
26.10.2017 (University of Bristol): Globalization & Nation in the Austrian Littoral (1859-1914). The quest for interpretation in digital history
23.11.2017 (University of Helsinki):
7.12.2017 at 13.00-18.00 - afternoon seminar at Kielikeskus (Fabianinkatu 26), seminar room 203 - speakers include (St. Andrews), , , and . Programme:

Spring 2017

27.1.2017 (University of Helsinki): Semantic domains in Akkadian texts
10.2.2017 (Aalto Media Lab): Visualizing Electronic Literature Collections
3.3.2017 and (National Library of Finland): What web (archives) can offer for digihumanists
17.3.2017 (University of Helsinki): Hierarchical information management of photographic collections: synthetic and natural archive units & : Culture Analytics - Insights
31.3.2017 (Aalto University): Discourse Connective Prediction Using Neural Networks (see also ) & (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 (University of Helsinki): Computing Metrical Variation in Ancient Greek Poetry
12.5.2017 (University of Helsinki): Encyclopaedic projects in the 18th and 21st centuries. Mapping the history of ideas through text reuse in ECCO (see also )
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 to sign up.

Autumn 2016

16.09.2016 (University of Turku): Digital humanities, Open Science &
30.09.2016 (Uppsala University):
5.10.2016 Heldig Kickoff Event ()
14.10.2016 (University of Helsinki):
28.10.2016 (University of Helsinki): .
11.11.2016 (Göttingen) on electronic text reuse acquisition with & (Göttingen) on Brothers Grimm and the motif research

Spring 2016

27.5.2016 Holger Kaasik, Digital analysis of medieval liturgical calendars – the case of 14th and 15th century Vatican manuscripts
13.5.2016 , Multi-dimensional approaches to sentiment analysis
12.5.2016 (Professor of Digital Culture, University of Turku): “Digitality and materiality in culture” (in English). Place: Topelia, D112
4.5.2016 (Trinity College Dublin), The 1641 Depositions: Records of Massacre, Atrocity & Ethnic Cleansing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (NB! Venue: Metsätalo (U40), Lecture Room 4 (2nd floor)
20.4.2016 Mike Mertens, Dariah & Digital Humanities in Cultural Heritage Research. Metsätalo, lh 4 (Unioninkatu 40) …
8.4.2016 (), “Bad representation: or why Digital Humanities hates Cultural Studies”
23.3.2016 Wrap up of Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries conference and sharing of Oslo experiences.
4.3.2016 Discussion about conference (15.-17.3.2016) with a chance to introduce one’s own presentation and get feedback.
19.2.2016 , . For this meeting, please read the following article in advance:

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: (HY)
13.11.2015 Ylva Grufstedt (HY, History), “The Practice of History in videogames – Historical culture and consciousness in digital and interactive media”. Commentator: (Tampere)
27.11.2015 Eric Malmi (Aalto, Computer Science), “Automatically Reconstructing and Analyzing Family Trees”. Commentator: (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: (HY)
18.12.2015 Anna Kajander, (HY, Ethnology), “Digital book culture and the new reading habits”. Commentator: (Aalto)