Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon 2021 #DHH21

The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon is a chance to experience an interdisciplinary research project from start to finish within the span of 10 days. For researchers and students from computer science and data science, the hackathon gives the opportunity to test their abstract knowledge against complex real-life problems. For people from the humanities and social sciences, it shows what is possible to achieve with such collaboration. 
 
For both, the hackathon gives the experience of intensely working with people from different backgrounds as part of an interdisciplinary team, as, during the hackathon, each group develops a digital humanities research project from start to finish. Working together, they formulate research questions with respect to particular data sets, develop and apply methods and tools to answer them, and present the work at the end of the hackathon. For information on what the hackathon was like in previous years, see #DHH19, #DHH18, #DHH17, #DHH16 and #DHH15.

In 2021, the event was organized as an online hackathon. As a CLARIN, DARIAH and SSHOC summer school, the event was truly international, welcoming applications from all over Europe and beyond! Participation to #DHH is free to all accepted participants.

3–6 ECTS credits may be gained from participating in the hackathon for students in University of Helsinki and other universities.

Themes

This year, the hackathon groups organized around the following seven themes, each of which has now been linked to the final output report written by the group (for the initial background presentations on the themes, see here).

• Finnic oral po­etry – exploring themes, characters and formulas in a highly varying corpus of oral folklore
  • output: What are the youths up to? A dive into Finnic oral poetry
• Cit­izen ini­ti­at­ives, Twit­ter and journ­al­ism – studying modern-day interaction between digital newsmedia journalism and Twitter.
  • output: #DHH21 FloPo Project Final Blog Post
• Space Wars: The loc­a­tion of re­port­ing the Great War in France, Aus­tria and Fin­land – investigating the places dominating news reporting during the Great War between 1914 and 1918
  • output: Where did it happen? Spatial imaginaries of World War I
• Pierre Bayle and Early-Mod­ern Brit­ish Text Re­use Phe­nom­ena – exploring eighteenth-century intertextuality through text reuses surrounding Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary

  • output: Eighteenth-Century English Versions of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary: A Computational Study

• Polit­ics and place in the Finnish par­lia­ment­ary de­bates – looking at the various ways locations get used in political discourse and rhetorics
  • output: Semparl – Cities in parliament
• Ex­plor­a­tion of society through the lens of la­bour mar­ket re­lated doc­u­ment­a­tion – comparing the coverage, style and subjects discussed in collective labour agreements from more than 50 countries
  • output: CBAQuest Final Report including Tools !
• Par­laMint: com­par­able cor­pora of par­lia­ment­ary de­bates – comparing parliamentary debates before and during Covid-19 across multiple European parliaments from linguistic, sociological, political and computational perspectives
  • output: Parliamentary debates in the COVID times

Timetable and prac­tic­al­it­ies

The hackathon took place between 19.–28.5.2021. The participants were expected to commit to the hackathon for the whole period; work took place mainly between 10 AM and 5 PM (Finland / EEST / UTC+03:00) on weekdays (the weekend was free!). In addition, there were three pre-sessions on Tuesdays 27.4., 4.5. and 11.5., between 2 – 4 PM for orientation, group formation and preparation for the intensive hackathon period. The participants were expected to attend also these pre-sessions. For more details, see the detailed timetable and further information on practicalities (including prerequisites and credits for students).

Public presentations of the projects:
28.5.2021 13:00–16:00, Zoom
See further information.

Sched­ule for #DH­H21

9.–31.3.2021 Application period
9.4.2021 Applicants informed of acceptance
9.–14.4.2021 Registration to #DHH21 for accepted participants
27.4. & 4.5. & 11.5.2021 Three #DHH21 pre-hackathon preparatory sessions, 2–4PM UTC+03:00
19.–28.5.2021 #DHH21 hackathon online, 10AM – 5PM UTC+03:00

Please note that we can only accept participants who are able to commit to the full week of intensive work (not just a couple of hours here and there), as well as the preparatory sessions. Thus, if you know that you have other commitments during the hackathon, please consider applying next time when you can make a full commitment.

Or­gan­isa­tion

General organisers:

• Mikko Tolonen, associate professor in computational history at the University of Helsinki
• Eetu Mäkelä, associate professor in human sciences – computing interaction at the University of Helsinki
• Jukka Suomela, associate professor in distributed algorithms, logic and complexity at Aalto University
• Jouni Tuominen, research coordinator at HELDIG, University of Helsinki; staff scientist at Aalto University