- HSSH external assesment kicks off!
- Catalyst Grant funding for 2025
- New Visiting Professors selected in round 4
- Brown Bag Seminar every Wednesday at 12.15 – next session with Maria Teresa Ballestar on 4.9.
- First policy brief from EU Horizon project on authoritarian states’ control of information
- 18.9. New Research Culture lecture with Professor Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology): The Filter in Our Heads – Digital Media and Polarisation
- 19.9. Workshops on Digital Methods with Axel Bruns and Laura Vodden
- 5.9. Huminfra - Advancing Research Infrastructures for the Humanities in Sweden (and Beyond)
- 5.9. Rajapinta: Guidelines for using Generative AI ethically for research + Rajapinta summer party
HSSH external assesment kicks off!
An external assessment of Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) will begin in the autumn and will be carried out during the academic year of 2024-25.
“The Profi funding that has sustained HSSH up to this point is now past the halfway mark. The first edition of HSSH has been established, and it is a good time to gather feedback both from within and outside the Institute,” says HSSH Director Risto Kunelius
“We will soon be sending a short survey to people who have worked with us, and later organize some feedback events. The assessment will help us plan HSSH’s path to future, and this assessment will provide a good foundation for these discussions.”
Catalyst Grant funding for 2025
The aim of the Catalyst Grant funding is to provide modest but strategical support for launching initiatives, collecting and sharing new data, acquiring and sharing research equipment, and building new contacts and networks between research groups.
For 2025 funding, received 36 high quality proposals which were assessed by a team of reviewers within HSSH. The evaluation process paid attention to the following criteria: testing and developing new ideas, multidisciplinarity, the feasibility of suggested action, and promise of added value for other researchers in the SSH field beyond the applying research group. Successful applications were strong on several of the criteria.
Congratulations to all the funded projects! The next Catalyst Grant call for applications will open in spring 2025.
Click here to see the public descriptions of all funded projects.
New Visiting Professors for 2025
The mission of HSSH is to support multidisciplinary research, cross-faculty cooperation and methodological development at the City Center Campus. In order to support this, we invited proposals for HSSH Visiting Professor positions for 2024 and received several high quality applications.
In the third round of the Visiting Professor Programme call, 12 new visiting professors were selected and they will visit Helsinki in 2025, working together with several research groups during their visit.
The following visiting professors were selected in the fourth round call:
Johan Östling, Lund University
Desmond Elliott, University of Copenhagen
Simona Pekarek Doehler, University of Neuchâtel
Ingrid Schoon, University College London
Guido Noto La Diega, University of Stirling
Surinderr Jodhka, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Fred Markowitz, Northern Illinois University
Kohei Saito, University of Tokyo
Isaac Airiail Reed, University of Virginia
Robert Mason, Gulf States Institute in Washington, United Nations University
Irus Braverman, SUNY Buffalo Law School
Nick Couldry, The London School of Economic and Political Science
Brown Bag Seminar every Wednesday at 12.15 – next session with Maria Teresa Ballestar on 4.9.
HSSH Methodological Brown Bag Seminar is up and running!
Every Wednesday at 12.15 (note the new time slot!).
In the next meeting on 4.9. Maria Teresa Ballestar will talk about bridging AI and advanced analytics for strategic business decisions. Bring your own lunch, we bring fresh methodological topics!
The seminars are organized as hybrid events. You’re warmly welcome to join us at the HSSH Seminar Room, Fabianinkatu 24 A, room 524, 5th floor, or on Zoom.
Click here to add the Brown Bag Seminar events directly to your calendar (.ics file).
“We to introduce methodological innovations and cutting-edge research in various disciplines in an easily accessible manner and have an interdisciplinary discussion in an easy-going atmosphere over lunch” Methodological Unit’s University Researcher Matti Pohjonen says.
Read more about the event on our website!
First policy brief from EU Horizon project on authoritarian states’ control of information
HSSH, with work led by university researcher Matti Pohjonen from HSSH’s Methodological Unit, is a partner in a EU Horizon project led by CMI (Chr. Michelsen Institute) in Bergen, Norway, that explores different mechanisms of authoritarian information suppression globally.
The project now has its own website with current information of the project’s latest activities and publications. The first policy brief of the project has been published and it focuses on the conceptualisation of information suppression. The brief highlights how the concept of information suppression includes a distinct set of tools deployed by governments that fall outside of the more thoroughly analysed concept of disinformation. Information suppression is used strategically to silence opposition and control narratives both domestically and internationally.
To effectively counter information suppression, a nuanced understanding is crucial. This includes recognising the interplay between online and offline tactics, the role of non-state actors, and the complex dynamics within diaspora communities. By addressing these factors, policymakers and researchers can develop more comprehensive strategies to protect freedom of expression and democracy.
"A rigorous conceptual understanding of information suppression is crucial to research the contemporary politics of digital media. This implies the need to include both classical mechanisms of information suppression such as media censorship and internet shutdowns that are widely used globally but also the new ways actors manipulate the "salience" of information through mechanisms such as flooding social media with misleading content, algorithmic amplification of spin or emerging forms of AI-driven propaganda," Matti Pohjonen says.
18.9. New Research Culture lecture with Professor Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology): The Filter in Our Heads – Digital Media and Polarisation
Prof. Axel Bruns, Australian Laureate Fellow, QUT Digital Media Research Centre
18.9. at Helsinki Collegium, Fabianinkatu 14 A, 3rd floor at 16.00
Climate change, Brexit, Trump, COVID, Ukraine: there is hardly a major topic in contemporary public debate online that does not attract heated discussion, entrenched partisanship, widespread misinformation, and conspiracy theorists. Rational, evidence-based contributions often fail to cut through, while affective polarisation is prevalent, and difficult to overcome.
The facile, simplistic view of these developments is that digital and social media have disrupted the traditional public sphere, enveloped us all in ideologically homogenous ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, and thereby ushered in the post-truth age – but such technologically determinist explanations have been rightly debunked for failing to account for the full complexity of the present moment in public communication. Hyperpartisans and conspiracy theorists, for instance, are abundantly aware of what their opponents think and say, but instinctively, reflexively reject those views: if there is a filter, it is located in their (and equally perhaps in our) heads, not their information feeds. Similarly, if global digital media platforms were predominantly to blame for the decline of societal cohesion and consensus, why are countries like the US considerably more deeply affected while other democracies remain considerably more resilient?
While these deep divisions are often misdiagnosed as evidence of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, then, they actually point to pernicious dysfunction at a discursive level: they are evidence of deeply entrenched polarisation and hyperpartisanship. Yet digital media studies have yet to develop a full repertoire of conceptual and methodological approaches for the analysis and assessment of such phenomena. Such approaches need to be able to distinguish between benign forms of ideological agonism and partisanship and destructive, entrenched polarisation; and they need to recognise diverse ideological, issue-based, interpretive, and affective qualities in polarised discourse. This evidence is critical to enabling an urgently needed, robust defence of our societies and democracies against the challenges of polarisation.
Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current research focusses on the study of public communication in digital and social media environments, with particular attention to the dynamics of polarisation, partisanship, and problematic information, and their implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere; his work draws especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he posts at @snurb_dot_info / @snurb@aoir.social / @snurb.bsky.social.
19.9. Workshops on Digital Methods with Axel Bruns and Laura Vodden
The workshops are held on 19.9. from 10–12 and 13–14 at HSSH Seminar room 524, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor and they are intended for researchers (including PhD researchers). Sign up for the workshops here! More information below.
10–12
Axel Bruns: An Introduction to Practice Mapping
This workshop introduces the analytical approach of practice mapping (Bruns et al., 2024), using vector embeddings of networked actions and interactions to map commonalities and disjunctures in the practices of social media users, as a framework for methodological advancement beyond the limitations of conventional network analysis and visualisation. In particular, this innovative methodological framework has the potential to incorporate multiple distinct modes of interaction into a single practice map, can be further enriched with account-level attributes such as information gleaned from textual analysis, profile information, available demographic details, and other features, and can be applied even to a cross-platform analysis of communicative patterns and practices. Using a sample dataset, this workshop introduces the basic steps in practice mapping and provides an outlook on how it may be applied in the study of complex communicative processes in social media.
Bruns, A., Kasianenko, K., Suresh, V. P., Dehghan, E., & Vodden, L. (2024, July 8). Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks. arXiv. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05956 arXiv:2407.05956 [cs]
13–15
Laura Vodden: Automating News Content Coding with Large Language Models
Social science scholars are increasingly adopting computational methods in their research. LLMs offer accessibility and a potentially cost-effective solution for extending the scope of social science research; however, their opaque and non-deterministic nature poses a challenge for evaluating their outputs and ensuring research integrity. This workshop will demonstrate how to use OpenAI’s GPT models for various content coding tasks, using news articles covering the COP26 and COP27 events. This workshop will see participants generate a ‘gold standard’ dataset, run a prompt using GPT to code a small set of news articles, and compare results between human codes and LLM outputs - and will encourage participants to think about the potential of LLMs in social science research.
Participants will require:
- a laptop with internet connection
- an OpenAI account/API Key (potential to use the free credits available with a new account)
- a Google account (for accessing a Google Colab notebook)
- no programming experience necessary as the Colab Notebook will be pre-set up for participants to run code
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Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current research focusses on the study of public communication in digital and social media environments, with particular attention to the dynamics of polarisation, partisanship, and problematic information, and their implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere; his work draws especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he posts at @snurb_dot_info / @snurb@aoir.social / @snurb.bsky.social.
Laura Vodden is a Data Scientist and PhD candidate at the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia. Laura's research interests include interrogating framing in news media and the exploration of embedded social bias in machine learning and artificial intelligence models. In her PhD research, Laura is developing a software pipeline and an analytical framework designed to assist researchers in the effective utilisation of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various social science research tasks.
5.9. Huminfra - Advancing Research Infrastructures for the Humanities in Sweden (and Beyond)
September 5 @ 4:15 pm - 6:00 pm
The Helsinki DH research seminar kicks-off this season with a visit from digital ethnologist and Sámi scholar Prof. Coppélie Cocq from the University of Umeå. Cocq is currently the deputy director of the Swedish research infrastructure Huminfra and in her talk she will introduce the important task of “Advancing Research Infrastructures for the Humanities in Sweden (and Beyond)”. The talk will take place onsite at Metsätalo (Lecture Hall 17), due to limited seats available, Zoom will be available for remote participation. Seminar schedule and practical infos: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/digital-humanities/teaching/digital-humanities-research-seminar
5.9. Rajapinta Meetup: Guidelines for using Generative AI ethically for research + Rajapinta summer party
Welcome to our next meetup & summer party!
Meetup: New guidelines for using Generative AI for research
Where: Tiedekulma, Helsinki; 2nd floor meeting rooms
When: Thursday 5.9. 14-16
from 16 -> Summer party (location tba)
What:
1) Identifying shortcomings
Let’s rant a bit about guidelines for ethical GenAI use in research: what problems and issues they have, do they limit research too much, do they even make sense etc etc.
If you have a published or drafted ethical GenAI guideline. you want us to rant, please sent it to matti.nelimarkka@helsinki.fi on Thursday morning.
2) Towards better GenAI guideline
After all the ranting and debate, we will use remaining time to (start to) develop a better guideline for our community.
If we were able to write guidelines ourself, what would they say?
Some food and drinks are provided thanks to generosity of Helsinki Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.
3) From 16 -> Summer party
After the meet-up we will continue with a Rajapinta summer party. There will be some snacks available. You are warmly welcome to come and meet fellow Rajapinta members and enjoy a relaxing evening together!