- Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from HSSH – see you again in January!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from HSSH – see you again in January!
As the year draws to a close, we would like to thank everyone who has taken part in HSSH activities over the past months. This year has brought together a wide range of events, discussions, and sustained collective effort—including the important work around our external evaluation. Now it is time to pause, rest, and enjoy the holiday season.
Our activities resume in January. The
You can also keep up with HSSH news and updates on LinkedIn, where we regularly share information about our events and community.
Wishing you a relaxing holiday season and a good start to the new year!
HSSH Analog Afternoon Showcases Digitization Support for Researchers
The
The hands-on portion highlighted the challenges and quirks of old media technology. Exploring the tangle of switches and controls on vintage playback devices can look complicated but is usually simple. “These things have many buttons, and most of them don’t do anything relevant,” organizer Pentti Henttonen said.
Participants were reminded that HSSH Interlab actively supports research needs.“If there’s a research-based need, Interlab and HSSH will do their best to get the equipment needed, and help,” Henttonen said. Researchers with digitization needs are encouraged to reach out. Interlab can acquire equipment based on the materials and formats researchers work with, so don’t hesitate to
Interlab, administered by HSSH, supports multimodal individual and interaction research and provides facilities, software, and equipment for both on-site and field data collection. Researchers can book consultations for methodological or technical guidance, including digitization needs.
HSSH Slow Science Day brought the university community together to reflect on unhurried scholarship
The HSSH Slow Science Day: Multimodal dialogues on unhurried science was held at the end of October at Siltavuorenpenger. The event, organised by the interdisciplinary Slow Science research group with support from HSSH, invited members of the university community – researchers, teachers, students and administrative staff – to consider the conditions and pace of contemporary academic work.
Interest in the event turned out to be high: the 50 available places were filled quickly, and registration closed early. Perhaps reflecting the fast pace of academic work, only a little over half of those registered were able to attend the event. It is increasingly difficult to set aside an entire working day for voluntary gatherings, no matter how meaningful the topic.
During the day, participants engaged with collected autoethnographic material, discussed their own experiences of how academic capitalism and acceleration of time are felt and influence to academic work, and took part in art-based activities such as poetry writing and light improvisation.
The organisers also presented preliminary observations from their ongoing autoethnographic project on unhurried science. Participant feedback indicated that opportunities to reflect collaborativelyand with multiple methods on academic practices are timely and needed. There was a collectively sensed desire to start to change how we are conducting our work.
Given the strong interest, the Slow Science research group is planning further events to continue the discussion and explore the theme in more depth. The next event will be organized next May in collaboration with the University of Arts. Stay tuned and follow our news!
HSSH Project Planner Juho Pääkkönen defended his dissertation on credibility-building in social science big data
HSSH Project Planner Juho Pääkkönen defended his doctoral dissertation Credibility-building for social science big data on Saturday, 29 November at the University of Helsinki. The dissertation examines how social scientists negotiate the credibility of digital big data and what kinds of conceptions of research emerge through this process.
The opponent was Associate Professor Jacob Habinek from Linköping University, and the custos was Professor Petri Ylikoski from University of Helsinki.
Pääkkönen’s work shows that the challenges of using big data in the social sciences are not merely technical but fundamentally organizational and epistemic. Diverging understandings of acceptable research practices shape how new data sources and computational methods can be adopted. The dissertation includes six research articles and an introduction that explore credibility-building across sociology, the digital humanities, commercial social media analytics, and computational social science.
The dissertation highlights the need for further empirical research on the use of new digital datasets, computational techniques, and emerging AI-based tools in the social sciences. According to Pääkkönen, the implications of these resources cannot be understood without examining how their use is framed, justified, and debated across different research contexts.
New article by HSSH’s Anton Berg & Pentti Henttonen: Believing in simulated virtual scents
A new study in Scientific Reports shows that people can experience smells that are not physically present if they believe those scents are part of a virtual reality environment. The findings highlight how expectations shape sensory perception, even in olfaction. The article was written by HSSH’s post-doctoral researcher Anton Berg and former Interlab coordinator Pentti Henttonen.
Helsinki–South Africa collaboration advances methodological discussion on African scholarship
HSSH researchers Jouni Tuominen and Matti Pohjonen recently visited South Africa as part of the ongoing research collaboration between the University of Helsinki’s Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) and the University of Witwatersrand (Wits). The collaboration focuses on combining African scholarship with methodological innovation. The trip was funded by GAINS seed funding (Generative AI and Africa: New Methodological Directions for Social Sciences and Humanities Research) awarded to HSSH university researcher Matti Pohjonen through the University of Helsinki Africa Programme.
A key feature of the collaboration is the integration of HSSH’s digital humanities expertise with Wits’ strengths in decolonial, and African-centered scholarship and computer science. Professor Gagliarodne from Wits was recently appointed the inaugural SARChI SA–UK Bilateral Chair in Digital Humanities, a five-year collaboration between Wits University and the University of Edinburgh that aims to place African scholarship at the centre of global debates on digital futures. Over the next five years, the Chair will develop new computational and AI-related methods, pedagogical training and public resources to support more inclusive and just uses of digital technologies in the African context.
As part of this collaboration, Wits and HSSH hosted an intensive three-day workshop that brought together researchers, technical specialists, and students to reflect on how African scholarly knowledge is produced, archived, accessed, and analysed, and how computational and AI-based methods might reshape our understanding of these processes. To explore these changes, the project analysed citation patterns across all electronic Master’s and PhD theses from the University of Wits to examine how global patterns on knowledge production has shifted over the years and whether debates on decolonising knowledge have led to practical changes in how academics in African institutions are cited.
The workshop combined conceptual discussion, technical experimentation, and hands-on group work. Participants shared preliminary findings, tested tools and methodologies for analysing large-scale EDT textual data, and explored both the infrastructural and epistemic challenges of making African research more visible and reusable. These included questions of metadata quality, digitisation gaps, linguistic diversity, uneven platform infrastructures, and the global politics of knowledge circulation.
Frank Hindriks lectured on the open society in the age of identity
On 11 December 2025, Professor Frank Hindriks from University of Groningen delivered a lecture titled The Open Society in the Age of Identity at the HSSH Seminar Room in Fabianinkatu 24A. Despite the busy pre-Christmas period, the event drew a large audience from across the university community.
Hindriks examined how liberal democracies can remain resilient amid increasing polarization, inequality, and competing identity-based claims. He argued that in addition to social structures – conceived as combinations of rules and equilibria – robustly liberal democracies require inclusive and open mentality to sustainably safeguard basic rights. Cultivating the culture of critical reflection, tolerance, and epistemic modesty is essential for open societies.
A reception with drinks and snacks followed the in depth discussion.
9.1. Publication event: SampoSampo - Connecting Everything to Everything Else
This is an open invitation to the publication event of the new system “SampoSampo - Connecting Everything to Everything Else”. The event will be held in Finnish and it also celebrates Eero Hyvönen’s becoming an emeritus professor at the Aalto University.
SampoSampo is a new Linked Open Data service and semantic portal based on the Sampo model and series of systems that have had millions of users on the Semantic Web.
The SampoSampo data service and Knowledge Graph can be used for searching and enriching linked data from related data sources, similar in many ways to VIAF.org that links entities (people, places, etc.) in the collections of national libraries around the world. The SampoSampo portal can be used for finding and browsing entity data over some ten Sampo systems of cultural heritage and ten external related data services. In addition, consistency of shared data from different sources can be analyzed and “interesting” of even serendipitous new connections between entities discovered with explanations in natural language based on explainable Artificial Intelligence.
More information in English about SampoSampo with links to first publications can be found on the project homepage:
DARIAH-FI Workshop: New tools and data services for cultural heritage research, 22.1.2026, Online
This workshop unveils new infrastructure developed in the last two years making use of LLMs, computer vision and semantic web to help processing visual, multimodal or large-scale historical documents. In this full-day workshop participants will get acquainted with tools to find, acquire and process manuscripts, letters, historical images or cultural heritage accessible in FINNA and ASTIA services. The workshop includes sessions for researchers not familiar with computational methods and one session for advanced digital humanities research.
The workshop is organised by DARIAH-FI The Finnish network for data-intensive infrastructures for Humanities and Social sciences at the universities of Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Turku, Oulu, Aalto, in collaboration with the National Library and National Archives of Finland, with support of the Research Council of Finland.
Questions and contact: Inés Matres (