Past Brown Bag Seminar events 2024-2025

Information about past Brown Bag Seminar events in 2024-2025.
16.4.2025 Juho Pääkkönen & Jaakko Taipale

Terminological borrowing between behavioral economics and law and technology literature – A topic modeling study

This presentation is based on our ongoing research that examines whether and how ideas from the field of behavioral economics (BE) are adopted and used in the field of technology law (TL). Technology law is an emergent field of legal studies that has a significant role in regulating novel technologies, especially during the current digital and computational transformations. While the relationship between BE and legal studies more generally has been described as a producer-consumer relation (Frerichs, 2011), the influence of BE ideas within technology law is not clear. We approach this research problem by way of modeling the extent to which terminology typical to behavioral economics is used in technology law literature. Drawing on publication abstract data from both fields (downloaded from OpenAlex), we use topic modeling (PLDA; McFarland et al. 2013) to extract terminology typical to both BE and TL discussions, and then to estimate whether behavioral economics terminology is present in technology law abstracts. Our current results indicate marginal presence of BE topics in TL – however this could be due to a number of factors, including problems related to data collection and model selection. In the latter part of the presentation we discuss possible ways of alleviating these problems, and draw critical reflections on the potential of topic modeling as a technique for modeling knowledge transfer across scientific fields.

Juho Pääkkönen works as a project coordinator at the HSSH methodological unit and is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki. His PhD work examines how social scientists adapt and repurpose new digital data and analysis techniques in their research.

Jaakko Taipale is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology specializing in Science and Technology Studies with focus on law-science interaction. His current project, funded by Kone foundation, examines medico-legal decision-making in the context of insurance disputes.

9.4.2025 Marion Godman

Should data on ethnicity be collected in Europe? A philosophical-experimental approach

Marion Godman and Nicholas Haas

Collecting data on ethnicity (and often also race) is widespread globally and often regarded as a way of tracking and mitigating discrimination and other forms of inter-group inequalities. Not so in Europe (e.g. Simon 2012; European Commission 2017). Most European countries have opted to exclude not only race, but also ethnic categories from national censuses or population registers.

In this paper, we argue, that there are several hitherto overlooked both moral and epistemic costs of not collecting data on ethnicity.

We first respond to the idea that in fact there is no dearth of data at all since ethnicity is already accounted for by more generally acceptable categories like immigrant, or country of birth. We argue that these are not at all obvious proxies at all because they either entirely miss or fail to distinguish epistemically relevant information. Further, we highlight how the use of alternative categories to ethnicity can lead to certain “slippages” or ambiguities in meaning: where concepts like “immigrant”, function as “code” for different ethnic or racial categories, while also retaining a more literal and often more encompassing interpretation.

In addition to scrutinizing the epistemic and moral arguments, we adopt an experimental philosophy approach to addressing the by conducting small experiments with online respondents. First, we explore whether individuals use “immigrant” as a proxy for “Muslim” (or “Arab”) when deciding whether to discriminate or not. Second, we experimentally evaluate whether individuals provide differential support for the same arguments when they concern gender as opposed to ethnicity to test whether ethnicity is indeed a more sensitive category that should not be probed or registered (as is commonly assumed).

Marion Godman is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University and an affiliated scholar of the History and Philosophy of Science department, Cambridge University. Between 2012 and 2018 she was also based at Helsinki University working at TINT/Centre of Excellence in Philosophy of the Social Sciences. She works on a range of issues that concerns the philosophy of the human and social sciences and in political philosophy and endeavours to find a synthesis between these different areas as can be seen in her research monograph, The Epistemology and Morality of Human Kinds (2020, Routledge).

2.4.2025 Friederike Lüpke

Neural machine translation and language description & language documentation: shared data and methods?

Nature (NLLB team 2024) reports big progress in neural machine translation (NMN) and projects its ability to upscale to large numbers of languages for which only limited training text is available, without compromising quality. I investigate new proposals for low-resource languages, particularly those not written in formal contexts or containing multilingual ‘code-switched’ text. Existing models rely on users of these languages to translate text, but this results in highly unnatural data, so-called 'translationese' or use of very limited corpora, for instance Bible translations, which represent restricted domains of language use and are culturally heavily biased (Kuwanto et al. 2024). New proposals overcome these weaknesses through using semantically grounded multilingual written and spoken language (SLU) and a focus on cross-linguistic transfer of learning based on similarity for NMN. This is complemented by storyboard methods, where language users retell content presented as visual stimuli, thus preventing translationese. Similar information is collected by typologists, who investigate shared constructions across languages, or field linguists, who collect data with nonverbal stimuli. Can linguists and AI enter fruitful collaborations also benefitting users of low resource languages, and can NMN models based on training data provided by linguists also improve linguistic theories, or is this hope futile?

Friederike Lüpke is Professor of African Studies and chair of AfriStadi, the Africa Research Forum for Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on language description and documentation in multilingual settings in West Africa and on small-scale multilingualism worldwide. She is committed to an epistemological and methodological renewal of these disciplines so that they represent and benefit from global perspectives and are able to account more fully for richness and diversity of language use and language ideas.

References:

Kuwanto, Garry; Urua, Eno-Abasi E.; Amuok, Priscilla Amondi; Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan; Aremu, Anuoluwapo; Otiende, Verrah et al. (2024): Mitigating translationese in low-resource Languages: The storyboard approach. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pp. 11349–11360. Available online at http://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.10152.

NLLB team (2024): Scaling neural machine translation to 200 languages. In Nature 630 (8018), pp. 841–846. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07335-x

26.3.2025 Aleksi Knuutila

LLM-assisted topic modeling of noisy data: Benchmarking results and a case study of disguised propaganda from Ukrainian Telegram

In recent years, the social sciences and humanities have experimented with incorporating instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) into their methods. Though opinions about their capabilities vary, there has been interest in substituting existing approaches in data annotation and analysis with LLM-based approaches. Much of the interest in LLMs thus far has focused on their accuracy in classification tasks and lowering research costs, partly through obviating the need for manually classified training data via zero-shot learning. At the same time, the current application of these models has been compared to an "academic Wild West" due to a lack of benchmarks or shared best practices for reliable use.

This presentation explores how LLMs could complement existing analytical methods. In particular, I test their ability to enable topic modelling on noisy text corpora where only a subset of the text is relevant to the research agenda. I illustrate the approach with a case study from the project Eyewitness images in the war in Ukraine. This research compares Ukrainian Telegram channels in terms of how they cover the Ukrainian military operations in Kursk. Informed by domain knowledge and theoretical interests, we extract text segments related to military events and ascribed motivations from longer Telegram messages before applying established topic modelling approaches to the segments. Secondly, I test the reliability of this approach for topic modelling by comparing its results against large human-annotated benchmark datasets. The results suggest that one function for LLMs in social research could be in enabling flexible forms of feature selection (such as selecting text segments) to make complex datasets legible for established research methods.

Dr Aleksi Knuutila is a University Researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities. After his doctorate in the Digital Anthropology programme at University College London, Knuutila’s research has focused on online harms such as misinformation and harassment and how political groups take advantage of contemporary information environments. His current research projects focus on developing tools and infrastructure for journalists working on conflicts and applying generative AI to interpretative research workflows.

19.3.2025 Pertti Alasuutari

National Parliaments as a Global Institution

In this talk I will discuss the world’s parliaments as a global institution. By it I mean, for instance, that in their structures and practices, legislatures are very similar. It is evident, say, in that opening words of a session can be verbatim copies of those in other parliaments. Through such isomorphic, invariant practices, legislatures symbolize, sanctify, and naturalize the nation-state as the component part of world society. The global standardization of parliamentary practices has also constituted what is the world over understood by politics, radiating to the forms that political organization into parties, ideologies and movements has assumed. Furthermore, the invariant rules observed constitute parliamentary practices as rituals. In addition to the sanctity of rational, evidence-based reasoning embodied in the authority of science, there are four sacred principles that define national parliaments as an institution: national sovereignty, parliamentary immunity, the national interest or common good, and sanctity of fellow parliamentarians. These principles are honored in frontstage sessions, whereas bargaining between conflicting group interests takes place in backstage occasions. Yet frontstage performances are important because they frame the issues and justify the decisions taken by commonly approved virtues and principles. In addition to passing (or proposing) laws, national parliaments legitimate rule and serve as switchboards in global governance and travel of ideas.

Pertti Alasuutari is professor emeritus of sociology at Tampere University. Renowned for his textbooks in qualitative research, Researching Culture, Sage 1995, and An Invitation to Social Research, Sage 1998, during the past 20 or so years he has focused on studying politics and policymaking from a global perspective. His research interests also include media and social theory.

12.3.2025 Kati Kallio & Eetu Mäkelä

Variation in historical multilingual oral poetry

In this talk, we’ll present our methodological explorations into integrating computational approaches into the study of Finnic oral poetry. In the FILTER project, we’ve now spent multiple years collaborating between folklorists, computer scientists and linguists in trying to figure out ways to computationally tackle the massive amounts of variation of different levels (orthographic, linguistic, poetic, metrical, formulaic, typological, semantic) within the transcribed oral poetry collections of Finnish and Estonian cultural heritage institutions.

Kati Kallio is an Academy Research Fellow of the Research Council of Finland at the Finnish Literature Society (SKS) and holds a Title of Docent in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research has focused on genres, intertextuality and performance of Finnic oral poetry in different regions, languages and historical periods, and on the interaction of oral and literary traditions. 

Eetu Mäkelä is a professor at the University of Helsinki, where he (among other things) leads the Human Sciences–Computing Interaction research group. The aim of the group is to figure out the technological, processual and theoretical underpinnings of successful computational research in the humanities and social sciences. This the group does mostly by participating in interdisciplinary collaborations such as the FILTER project.

5.3.2025 Jaakko Kuorikoski & Samuli Reijula

Explanation, Prediction, and Understanding in Computational Social Science

In a series of papers, a group of prominent social and behavioral scientists has articulated how new forms of data, data analysis, and computational modeling change the prospects – and perhaps the very conceptions – of explanation and prediction in the social sciences. In Hofman et al. (2021) they introduce a new framework for categorizing empirical methods in computational social science. The framework sorts methods based on their relative emphasis on causal explanation vs data-based prediction, with the claim that being more explicit and reflective about the exact aims of research would accelerate scientific progress in the social sciences.

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the methodological self-understanding of computational social science by introducing additional conceptual tools from the philosophy of science. Most importantly, philosophy of science has, in the last twenty years or so, provided newfound clarity on the central concepts of explanation, prediction and understanding, as well as important insights into their relations with exploration, testing and model selection. We argue that these resources will advance the project proposed by Hofman et al. by offering a more refined picture of the relationship between explanation, prediction and theory confirmation in computational social science.

”Making data speak: Towards a philosophy of data-driven social science” project (PI: Jaakko Kuorikoski).

Samuli Reijula is an Academy of Finland Research fellow and a university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His area of expertise is the philosophy of science, with interests in cognitive science and science studies (incl. science of science). His research interests include collective problem solving, cognitive diversity, science policy, and foundations of evidence-based policy.

26.2.2025 Ingrid Schoon

Ideal Types and Fuzzy Lives: Mapping Youth Transitions Over Time

Mapping lives over time is a complex task, given the multitude of events, conditions, domains, and temporal particulars that comprise each life course. This presentation focuses on the analysis of youth transitions in times of social change. During the last 50 years the transition to independent adulthood has undergone considerable changes. In response to changing employment opportunities and technological innovations increasing numbers of young people participated in higher education, delaying the step into paid employment and family formation. Yet, there are also many young people who are struggling to achieve the traditional markers of adulthood, with unemployment, economic instability, and in-work poverty becoming common experiences. The standard model of emerging adulthood fails to acknowledge young people’s multiple ways of navigating transitions and multiple ways of becoming adults, as well as the different life conditions from which different young people start their paths of transition. Moving beyond the use of variable-centered approaches that assess population-level changes on aggregate level, this presentation introduces different applications of person-centered strategies that take the person as the unit of analysis. The objective is to characterize youth transitions in sufficiently general terms so as to represent a population of lives while retaining some of the nuance of individuals’ life stories and to document changes over time. Drawing on data from the UK cohort and panel studies, differences and similarities in patterns of youth transitions are examined, comparing the experiences of young people born in the 1970s to those born in the 1990s.

Ingrid Schoon is Chair of Social Policy at the Social Research Institute, University College London. Her research focuses on the study of risk and resilience, in particular during the transition to independent adulthood and regarding social inequalities in competence development.

Ingrid Schoon is HSSH Visiting Professor in 2025.

5.2.2025 Antti Kanner

Dynamics of functional language change

The project – Dynamics of functional change – develops methods to track linguistic changes’ spread within language and withing speech community in historical corpora using large language models and statistical methods from ecology. The data comes from National Library of Finland’s Newspaper Collection and covers years 1860 – 1940, period of rapid development of modern standard Finnish. It concentrates on functional (semantic and grammatical) changes and alongside attested changes seeks to detect also processes that have been interrupted or even reversed. It aims to build an extensive repository of changes observed in its dataset, which allows comparative analysis of functional changes, as well as analysing interactions between individual changes.

Antti Kanner is a researcher in the fields of Finnish language and digital humanities, currently serving as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku in the Human Diversity consortium. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Helsinki in 2022, where he focused on the intersections of linguistic semantic theories, and digital methodologies.

Kanner has actively contributed to several research projects, including the study of intertextuality and thematic networks in Finnic oral poetry and the exploration of power dynamics in media narratives. His expertise extends to quantitative linguistics, with a particular emphasis on historical semantics and public discourse in Finland. 

29.1.2025 Kirsten Fischer

Memory and Memoir: Family Stories and the Imperfect Art of Inoculation Against Authoritarianism

This presentation asks whether and how family stories—remembered and shared with later generations—serve to inform and warn against pending authoritarian movements. Scholars have studied the intergenerational impact of unspoken trauma, but what if those negative experiences can be made productive in light of new threats to democratic systems? How might family stories produce counter-narratives when official commemorations tip into self-serving propaganda? Historian Kirsten Fischer explores these issues by reflecting on stories from her own (non-Jewish) German family who experienced the Nazi era in a small town that later became part of East Germany. She asks what kinds of histories family stories and personal memoirs produce, and how they differ from professional scholarship about the past. Interdisciplinary, messy, anecdotal, and inconclusive, this talk raises more questions than it answers and hopes to generate a rich discussion of the politics of personal memory in challenging political times.

Kirsten Fischer, Professor of History at the University of Minnesota (Ph.D. Duke University) is the author of Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Cornell University Press, 2002) and American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). She is currently working on a book-length hybrid history/memoir titled “Unfamiliar Truths: A Divided German Family Narrates its Past.” Fischer uses oral histories, archival research, public sites of commemoration, and personal memory to explore how individual families as well as the larger culture recall the political and humanitarian disasters of 20th-century Germany. Fischer received the University of Minnesota’s competitive “Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education” in 2011, and she has recently been nominated by students for an “Exemplary Teaching Award.”  Fischer teaches courses on “History through Memoir,” “Radical Environmentalism in the US,” “Contested Nation: The Early American Republic,” and “The Holocaust in Public and Private Memory.” She has held two year-long fellowships at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, once as a Fulbright scholar. In spring 2023, she accepted an invitation to teach a Master’s level class on “Religion and Environmentalism in the US” at the Sorbonne University in Paris for four weeks. This spring she will be a visiting professor at the University of Graz, Austria. She recently finished a term as a board member for the Minnesota chapter of the Fulbright organization. 

22.1.2025 Gari Walkowitz

Studying Distributive Fairness in Strategic Asymmetric Bargaining

Strategic asymmetric bargaining refers to a situation where the parties involved 1) negotiate about a cake to be distributed, 2) decide sequentially on offers and offers’ acceptance, 3) have positive and differing outside options available to them if the bargaining fails. Using three related methodological approaches from the field of behavioral economics, we illustrate how distributive fairness can be studied and better understood in this context. The first step is to discuss a classical utility framework (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999) in which agents maximize their own utility but also consider the utility of their bargaining partners. The model is extended so that agents do not only use the “equal split” as a fairness reference point (as traditionally modelled), but also prefer other, equity-based, allocations. We will show that preferences for these alternative fairness reference points depend on bargainers’ i) outside options and, in turn, on their relative bargaining power, ii) assumptions about other agents’ preferences, and iii) degree of self-servingness. In a second step, we present an experimental framework that allows us to test different theories of distributive fairness in a systematic quantitative and incentive-compatible way under controlled conditions. In the final step, an extended qualitative approach is used to investigate which processes may lead to the observed (fair) outcomes of the bargaining process and how fairness deliberations and fair allocations may be related.

Gari Walkowitz is a full professor of behavioral and business ethics at the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiberg, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Bonn University. Before settling down in Freiberg, Gari Walkowitz has worked at Humboldt-University of Berlin, Bonn University, University of Cologne, and Technical University of Munich. His academic work is located at the interface between behavioral economics, social psychology, and philosophy and is dedicated to the design and effectiveness of institutions to promote ethical and sustainable behavior in companies and markets. As a prerequisite for this, he wants to better understand the interactive influence of organizational framework conditions, incentive systems, situational factors, and personal dispositions on individual and collective decisions in institutions when dealing with valuable resources. 

15.1.2025 Johanna Sumiala, Petter Korkman & Anton Berg

Digital Death – Modelling Conversations with the Living Dead 

Today, we live in a world that promises a digital afterlife. Global technology companies offer AI-based services that help to create digital figures based on the digital traces we leave after our biological death. But how does the presence of these ‘living dead’ shape and transform our relationships with the dead on an individual and societal level. Research on AI and death delves into these fundamental questions of human existence through the lens of recent technological developments in generative AI. 

One goal of the Digital Death research project, funded by the EU and led by Professor Johanna Sumiala ((University of Helsinki), was to look for new ways to communicate research on AI and death with a wider public. This idea led to a new type of collaboration with artists and the making of Afterlife, a theater production. The play was produced in collaboration with the University of Helsinki research team, artists, and the Helsinki National Theatre. The playwright and director of the production was Joel Teixeira Neves, and the play had its world premiere in the Helsinki National Theatre on November 28, 2024. 

The play featured two characters: Tina, a digital thanabot created from the traces of a deceased person by Anton Berg (post-doctoral researcher in the University of Helsinki), and Tina’s husband in mourning played by actor Pyry Nikkilä (the Finnish National Theatre).

In this Brown Bag seminar, Johanna Sumiala and Anton Berg will discuss the research topic of AI and death, share their experiences on research-art collaboration and consider ethical challenges related to the making and staging the digital thanabot-Tina. 

Johanna Sumiala ​​is Professor at Media and Communication Studies in the University of Helsinki. She is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at LSE, London, and Visiting Professor in the University of Bath (CDAS). Currently Sumiala leads EU CHANSE funded international and interdisciplinary research consortium: Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife (DiDe) including PIs in Denmark, the UK and Romania.

Anton Berg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities, Helsinki University. He is currently focusing on exploring and ethically revising computer vision and image recognition systems and studying perception, affect and engagement through utilizing eye-tracking, pupillometry and Virtual Reality (VR).

11.12.2024 Elina Oinas

The Qualitative Interview – epistemologies, ideals, and practical dilemmas

In the 1990s social sciences were, according to some, a battlefield of raging wars with troops in camps named, often in a sweeping gesture by the opponent, for example damned positivists, quasi-realists, relativists, gossipers, poets, cold free-riders, activists, colonialists etc. There were also fierce debates about the differences among those who engaged in developing methodologies for the qualitative interview. For example, feminists seeking emancipation, solidarity and sisterhood during the in-depth interview were not necessarily on the same page with neither stand-point nor discourse analysis. Where are we now in the ruins, what can be found in the rubble, or, possibly, in the flourishing commons? This talk will present an overview of the last 30 years of ideals and differences in the qualitative interview methodology. The talk will present three different and thriving interview traditions and argue that despite their overt differences they are not incompatible yet should not be sloppily conflated either. Furthermore, in the era of social media and big data, the interview may again need to be defended.   

Elina Oinas is professor in Sociology at the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland since 2015, and currently a core fellow at Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies. She is also Vice President of the International Sociological Association 2023-2027. Her long-term research interests are gender, the body, health, feminist science and technology studies STS, global sociology, global development, and girlhood studies.

27.11.2024 Corinna Coupette

Toward Meta-Methods for Network Analysis: Data Modeling Meets Research Validity

Networks are everywhere, and their mathematical representations as graphs are investigated in virtually every discipline across the formal sciences, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Consequently, the relevance of network data for reasoning about — and ultimately improving — our complex, interconnected world can hardly be overstated. Given the ubiquity and importance of network data, the intricate process of transforming real-world phenomena into graphs — i.e., data modeling — has received remarkably little attention. Integrating the perspectives of a domain data scientist and a method developer, in this talk, I will explore the connection between data modeling and research validity in network analysis. I will discuss how our current research culture encourages data-modeling practices that endanger research validity, and I will present a research agenda on meta-methods to foster a productive exchange between subject-matter experts seeking to understand relational data and computing experts striving to design novel network methods.

Corinna Coupette (they/she) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University, where they lead the Telos Lab conducting research in the intersection of law, computer science, and complex systems. They are also a Fellow at the Bucerius Center for Legal Technology and Data Science, a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and a Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. Before joining Aalto University, they spent ten months as a Digital Futures Postdoctoral Fellow at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Stockholm Resilience Center. 

Corinna studied law at Bucerius Law School and Stanford Law School, completing their First State Exam in Hamburg in 2015. They obtained a PhD in law (Dr. iur., summa cum laude) from Bucerius Law School and a BSc in computer science from LMU Munich, both in 2018, as well as an MSc in computer science in 2020 and a PhD in computer science (Dr. rer. nat., summa cum laude) in 2023, both from Saarland University. Their legal dissertation was awarded the Bucerius Dissertation Award in 2018 and the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society in 2020, and their interdisciplinary research profile was recognized by the Caroline von Humboldt Prize for outstanding female junior scientists in 2022.

Click here to visit Corinna's personal homepage.

20.11.2024 Emilia Palonen

How to build a ten-country dataset of audiovisual social media campaigning in the European Parliamentary Elections 2024 in a post-API environment? Multimethod data gathering and AI-assisted analysis in contemporary social science research

If in 2019 Twitter worked as a platform for political communication across Europe for the European Parliamentary elections, how to form a dataset for social media political communication in 2024? This is the challenge that the HEPP research team started to explore, and in the leadership of Emilia Palonen they took up a study of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube – in the fragmented media field. Challenges emerged both in the lack of API access for a lot of these platforms but also the multimodal character of the current formats of communication. With the help of the expertise from the HSSH, new methodologies for data gathering were planned and tested in early 2024 for Finnish presidential and Portuguese parliamentary elections. When the time came to gather data for the European Parliamentary campaigns, the project involved researchers across Europe, and suddenly 30 academics from ten countries were gathering data from two platforms while a data steward (Tomi Toivio) at the HSSH was accessing data online.

The presentation outlines principles of data gathering in the post-API era in multi-lingual and cross-cultural context. The project aims at generating a data set for several research consortia and to research use after that. The videos are categorised in an AI assisten pipeline. The research notes are transformed into ten country reports that also constitute part of the dataset but also contribute as research to knowledge of the discourses around the distinct platforms and in three types of political profiles. We hope to discuss also the ways in which large datasets can benefit from the interpretive gaze of Large Language Models (LLM). Ultimately, what is at stake in this experiment is the heuristic use of the AI and some theoretical concepts such as social contract, grievance politics and populism. It demonstrate how “big data” can be approached from a post-foundational and interpretivist perspective, and at the same time yield comparative results – one day with some explanatory power to contemporary political transformations in Europe.

Emilia Palonen is one of the three Programme Directors in Datafication at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities. She leads the HEPPsinki research group on Emotions, Populism and Polarisation, with many projects and researchers. Palonen’s work is in between politics and communication studies. She on leave from her position as Senior University Lecturer in Political Science, University of Helsinki, but she did all her academic degrees in the UK, including an MA and a PhD in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. This is the interpretive approach she has taught for almost twenty years to the students of political science at Helsinki. Most recently, Palonen has been working on large and smaller sets of social media data Twitter for the analysis of the pandemic (Koljonen and Palonen 2021) and the EP2024 elections. An edited volume with Juha Herkman Populism, Twitter and the European Public Sphere came out in spring 2024 on Palgrave. With Salojärvi, Horsmanheimo and Kylli (2023) she published an article in Visual Studies operationalising her formula of populism to a comparative study of the Finnish far right on the YouTube. Palonen is in the leadership of the horizon projects CO3 for the Social Contract and PLEDGE for Emotional politics funded for 2024-2027. She also has been leading Cluster 4 in the Academy of Finland and other Trans-Atlantic Partnership consortium funders' ENDURE project exploring resilience in crisis (2022-2025). These consortia engaged in a study of EP 2024 elections from a multimodal perspective.  Palonen is an engaged scholar in media and associations: She is an Executive Committee member in  the International Political Science Association (IPSA). She is a vice chair of the Finnish Federation of Learned Societies (2023-2024), and serves in the National Coordination of Open Science in Finland and the Committee on Human Rights at the Council of Finnish Academies. She co-chairs the first ever general track on Populism and Polarisation in the International Political Science Association’s World Congress in Seoul South Korea in July 2025.

13.11.2024 Rūta Kazlauskaitė

Immersive Non-fiction Virtual Reality Storyworlds: A Framework for Qualitative Analysis

There is a notable gap in scholarship that provides methodological guidelines for how to examine immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences, particularly non-fiction VR storyworlds. These non-fiction immersive storyworlds encompass a range of genres, including VR documentaries and journalism, educational content, and historical and heritage experiences. VR is a medium of storyliving, not merely storytelling (Kazlauskaitė 2024; Maschio 2017, 2021; Vallance and Towndrow 2022). It is a spatial, embodied, interactive, multisensory, perceptually-rich, affective, and user-oriented medium. These specific characteristics of VR should inform the framework for the analysis of non-fiction VR storyworlds. With its emphasis on storyliving, VR draws strong parallels to the oral tradition, as it mirrors the immersive nature of rituals and performances of myths, where stories are not merely told, but lived.

Participation in rituals and ceremonies can provide identity markers, establish group boundaries, develop and reinforce community bonds, inform participants about their roles in the group, as well as facilitate personal and community transformations. Like ritualized performances of myths, VR storyliving allows individuals to experience complex emotional states as well as participate in and enact a story in an embodied way. VR stories, as immersive digital myths, are not merely recounted but are experienced firsthand, with participants actively engaging in and living out the narratives. Just as users can learn a new skill in VR by physically mimicking the movements, they can also adopt, learn, and rehearse certain modes of feeling and being in VR, by embodying story-prescribed movements and perspectives. What is lived is remembered as something that happened “to me,” the user. A key finding on the impact of VR on memory is that VR experiences become part of users’ autobiographical memory (Kisker et al. 2021; Schöne et al. 2019, 2023).

In this presentation, I introduce a qualitative analytical framework that addresses key elements of VR storyworlds, such as spatial and temporal design, user roles and perspectives, relationality, and multisensory engagement. Drawing on visual narrative studies, haptic media studies, and embodied narrative inquiry, this methodology provides a structured approach to analysing how VR experiences are constructed and experienced. While VR narrative inquiry intersects with approaches in visual narrative studies, it goes further by incorporating an exploration of the embodied and multisensory dimensions of VR narratives, beyond ocularcentrism. In particular, the elements of touch and haptics need to be incorporated into the analysis of VR narratives. In analyzing VR storyworlds, four foundational questions serve as the starting point for understanding the immersive experiences: Where am I? Who am I? Who am I with, and what is our relation? What am I doing and feeling?

Rūta Kazlauskaitė is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Trained as a political scientist, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, working at the intersections of memory studies, media and communication studies, and political psychology. Through her ongoing and past projects, she examines perceptual as well as emotional engineering and memory politics in immersive digital storyworlds (VR/AR/MR). Currently, she is working in a Horizon Europe project “Politics of Grievance and Democratic Governance” (PLEDGE), where she investigates the role of immersive virtual reality content in shaping anti-/pro-democratic expressions of grievances and explores the opportunities and challenges these immersive experiences pose for democratic societies.

6.11.2024 Adrian Walsh

Internal Validity, External Validity and the Evaluation of Thought Experiments in Applied Ethics and Political Philosophy

Thought experiments clearly play a central role in much contemporary ethical theorising. In the recent literature on thought experiments, some commentators (e.g. Wilson 2016; Dowding 2019) have criticised the lack of attention paid by moral philosophers to two ideas which are key notions in science. These are internal and external validity. Wilson argues that if thought experiments are indeed a kind of experiment, then philosophers should begin any plausible search for rigour in the scientific literature on experimental research design. When designing a thought experiment, Wilson suggests we consider the extent to which ethical judgements that are correct or endorsed in the world of the experiment generalise to the world beyond the experiment.

This is an important question to consider. However, I suggest that Wilson’s approach (i) overstates the connection between real-world scientific experiments and thought experiments (ii) focuses too readily on the formal structure of thought experiments at the expense of the argumentative context. With respect to the former claim, I suggest that this points towards a more general thesis that it is a mistake to treat the reasoning involved in the use of thought experiments as a subset of scientific reasoning. I shall also consider, towards the end of the talk, a more moderate (and plausible) view of the positive role that the concepts of internal and external validity might play in evaluating and assessing the legitimacy of thought experiments.

Adrian Walsh is Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at the University of New England in Australia. Walsh works predominantly in political philosophy, the philosophy of economics and applied ethics, although he also has a keen interest in questions of philosophical methodology and in political questions concerning the proper boundaries between scientific disciplines. He has published widely in these areas. In addition to numerous articles in journals such as the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy, Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Walsh has published 5 books including two edited collections undertaken while working at the University of Helsinki as a Research Fellow between 2012 and 2016.

30.10.2024 Matti Pohjonen

The promises and perils of understanding the “context” of digital politics globally?

Understanding the “context” of social media conversations has become essential in today’s rapidly shifting communicative environments to avoid overly simplifying or normative explanations of digital politics globally. This, however, can be challenging for two reasons. Firstly, the growing popularity of using digital/computational methods and LLMs to analyze large-scale social media conversations excel in identifying macro-level patterns in the data but they also risk overlooking the nuanced political and cultural idiosyncrasies underlying it in different regions globally. Secondly, the popular conceptual frameworks and theories used to make sense of our digitally connected world have not been always developed with the idiosyncrasies of the different global digital media environments in mind. At worst, empirical research on social media use in especially marginal regions globally is still mostly lacking. At best, as Cheruiyot and Ferrer-Conill (2021) argue, research on digital media outside the dominant Western contexts has often been relegated to the domain of area studies and not seen as legitimate forms of theory building that also advance the “universal” disciplinary canon.

Yet, despite the growing importance of pinning down context – that is, the ability to locate events and phenomena in broader networks of historical antagonisms, political narratives and shifting cultural patterns of media use – this is by no means an easy process. It requires protracted and time-consuming efforts of capturing the nuanced political and historical trajectories that extend beyond a simple use of “methods” – often clashing with the societal urgency to rapidly understand the new crises constantly manifesting on social media (hate speech, mis/disinformation, fake news, deepfake). More fundamentally, however, what we colloquially call “context” can also be seen as something that is expandable and infinitely so. A more honest, and humble, approach is to rather acknowledge that a claim about context is just “an articulation concerning a set of connections and disconnections thought to be relevant to a specific agent that is socially and historically situated, and to a particular purpose” (Dilley 2002: 454). Which specific connections and disconnections to emphasize at any given point in the research  (and who decides on their relevance) can thus make a tremendous difference in how the results can be interpreted regardless of the methods used. 

This presentation reflects on the question of what does it mean to “do research on social media in global and comparative contexts?”  Through examples from old and new research projects on digital politics in Ethiopia, it reflects on the complex relationship between theory, methods and contextual interpretation that is necessary to understand the significance of emerging forms of digital politics globally and, in particular, and in relation to violent conflicts and digital activism.

Matti Pohjonen currently works as a Senior Researcher for the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH), University of Helsinki, leading methodological development on the use of internet and social media data and he co-leads The EU Horizon-funded project ARM (Authoritarian Information Suppression) and InfoLead (Information and Media Leadership Programme for Judges and Policymakers) together with University of Oxford and University of Florence.

23.10.2024 Jaakko Kuosmanen

Science Advice in Practice and Theory: The messy relationship between practical development work and academic research

This talk considers the relationship between practical development work and academic research. I have been leading a national development initiative Sofi (Science Advice Initiative of Finland) between 2019-2022, and a science-for-policy platform at the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Our main objective has been to develop new operating models for science advice that are fit for the present age. In the talk, I reflect on how previous research on the topic has been helpful for practical work and the limitations of its application. I also discuss how we have methodologically approached the development work and how realities have influenced our approaches.

Dr. Jaakko Kuosmanen is the Academy Secretary of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. He has previously been the Chief Coordinator of Sofi - a national science advice development initiative which led to the establishment of a new science-for-policy platform in Finland. Jaakko holds a PhD in Politics From the University of Edinburgh, and he has worked as a research fellow and lecturer at the Martin School and Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He has advised prime minister’s offices on science-for-policy topics on four different continents, and he is a long-time member of the National Foresight Steering Group at the Prime Minister’s Office in Finland. Jaakko also holds an Adjunct Professor position at the University of Helsinki.

16.10.2024 Johannes Koponen

Towards "the Foundation" with the Foundation Models? LLMs Are Getting More Precise in Making Social Predictions

The presentation discusses my side project where I estimated the precision of Large Language Models (LLMs) in making social predictions by replicating an article (Halawi et al. 2024) and improving on it. Even though LLMs hallucinate when asked foresight questions (Schoenegger & Park 2023), they contain embedded "world models" (Li et al. 2022) that reflect current social beliefs and causal relationships, offering an alternative means of prediction. By setting up synthetic prediction markets and addressing challenges such as hallucinations, I evaluate if newer LLMs demonstrate improved precision and better calibration in foresight questions. The findings highlight the significance of LLMs in advancing predictive capabilities. More broadly, attendees will gain insights into the capabilities and limitations of LLMs for foresight.

Johannes Koponen, PhD candidate, Founder. I am a practitioner and researcher with over 12 years of experience in strategic foresight and platform business models. Currently, I am working on my Ph.D. at the University of Helsinki. My research examines constraints to change and the role of information products that improve with use, exploring their potential impact on the public's right to hear. On the side, as the founder and CEO of Konsensus.me, I lead the development of an AI-enhanced information synthesis platform that helps experts make informed decisions for clients across government, private sector, and academia. 

I have authored two non-fiction books on platform societies and platform companies (2019, 2022). Previously, I led foresight projects at Demos Helsinki, advised on strategic communication at the Prime Minister’s Office, and taught Futures Studies at Aalto University. I also advise organizations on strategic foresight and serve as a member of the Finnish Council for Mass Media, contributing to media ethics and standards.

2.10.2024 Gabriele de Seta

Algorithmic folklore: What is it, and how to study it

Throughout decades of technological change in internet protocols and digital platforms, the production and circulation of online content genres like e-mail chains, viral videos, exploitable images and copypasta has been consistently theorized as a continuation and expansion of vernacular creativity—a digital folklore. Recent advancements in machine learning applications have brought new forms of automation to the forefront of online interactions, exposing users of social media platforms and apps to different and unfamiliar kinds of algorithmic logics, which range from the curatorial biases of recommender systems and content analytics to the expansive possibilities offered by large language models and synthetic media. All these forms of automation are not only shaping how content circulates, but also how it is produced, and this is already evident in new genres of vernacular creativity that emerge in response to algorithmic tools and their logics. 

In the first part of this presentation, I formalize a definition of algorithmic folklore - the outcome of vernacular creative practices grounded in new forms of collaboration between human users and automated systems - and sketch a typology of the sort of content that is likely to dominate digital ecosystems to come. In the second part, I discuss the possible methodological approaches to algorithmic folklore, focusing on ethnographic and experimental modes of qualitative inquiry which can enable a more critical and reflexive interaction with these new computational actors.

Gabriele de Seta is, technically, a sociologist. He is a Researcher at the University of Bergen, where he leads the ALGOFOLK project (“Algorithmic folklore: The mutual shaping of vernacular creativity and automation”) funded by a Trond Mohn Foundation Starting Grant (2024-2028). Gabriele holds a PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica and at the University of Bergen, where he was part of the ERC-funded project “Machine Vision in Everyday Life”. His research work, grounded on qualitative and ethnographic methods, focuses on digital media practices, sociotechnical infrastructures and vernacular creativity in the Chinese-speaking world. He is also interested in experimental, creative and collaborative approaches to knowledge-production.

25.9.2024 Lauri Mäkinen

Measuring poverty: brief overview on the long-standing issue

The operationalization on the concept of poverty into a poverty indicator has been regarded as one of the most difficult aspects of empirical poverty research. There exists a broad consensus on what poverty is; however, there is considerable disagreement regarding how it is best measured. During the last 120 years of modern poverty research, several different poverty indicators have been developed, but none are universally accepted. Debate about the best ways of measuring poverty would be futile if the indicators produced similar estimates about the prevalence and concentration of poverty. The presentation gives an overview on different poverty indicators and the results that these indicators produce. 

Lauri Mäkinen holds a PhD in Social Policy from University of Turku, where he defended his thesis  “What is needed at the acceptable minimum? Studies on the operationalisation of the concept of poverty”. Lauri’s research has focused on poverty, child poverty and especially poverty measurement. Before his current position at the Kela Research Unit, Lauri worked as a university teacher at the University of Turku and as a project researcher at Itla Children’s foundation. 

18.9.2024 Linda Jean Kenix

What is the Truth? Striving Towards Detached Observation and Objective Measurement through Content Analysis

Despite continued developments in the methodological scholarship in media and communication, content analysis remains one of the “most important research techniques in the social sciences” according to a pre-eminent pioneer in this field, Klaus Krippendorff. However, many methodological components of designing a strong content analysis remain misunderstood. This seminar will review the necessary components for a successful content analysis and argues that only by assiduously editing a robust code book and then coding media texts over extended periods of time largely outside of computer-aided techniques, can scholars perform statistical analyses that can confidently interpret, affirm and potentially reinforce multi-methodological assumptions in research. Conducting a powerful content analysis can be laborious work, but the alternative is a devolution into reductive research that does not address the broader context of media content.

Linda Jean Kenix is Professor and Head of the School of Language, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She has written 47 journal articles, 8 book chapters, and 57 conference papers, as well as 1 book and 1 edited book. In all of her research, she has fundamentally explored the representation of politically marginal groupings in mainstream (and alternative) media and the agenda setting function of that representation in the continual process of social change.

11.9.2024 Erjon Skënderi

Improving Duplicate Text Detection with Combined Text Representations


Detecting duplicate textual content online is important for improving the quality of information on online digital platforms. Classical text representation methods fail to capture the full complexity of text, resulting in less accurate results. In this talk, a new framework approach that combines multiple text representation techniques to better identify duplicate posts will be introduced. In the context of online Question and Answer platforms, a higher duplicate detection accuracy is achieved by leveraging the strengths of different text representation techniques. The benefits of this approach and key findings from the research will be discussed, along with potential applications of these techniques in other areas of text analysis.

Erjon Skënderi holds a Doctor of Science in Technology from Tampere University, where he defended his thesis on “Text Representation Methods in Big Social Data”. He also earned a master’s degree in computer science from Queens College, City University of New York. With a strong research background in natural language processing and machine learning, Erjon has focused on developing alternative approaches to text analysis in large-scale social data. He has contributed to various projects as a machine learning specialist, focusing on developing and applying NLP and text representation techniques across different application contexts.

4.9.2024 Maria Teresa Ballestar

Data Democratization: Bridging AI and Advanced Analytics for Strategic Business Decisions

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools play a critical role in democratizing data and improving decision-making processes in the dynamic field of business analytics.

This talk shows how advanced statistical techniques and AI are not only increasing productivity, but also enabling decision-makers to access top-tier data science. A case study in the marketing area that compares AI technology to conventional econometric and statistical methods for marketing mix modeling will be a major area of emphasis.

These technologies can provide business executives with the tools they need to understand complex market dynamics and promote a more strategic and knowledgeable approach to company growth. We will showcase the significant contributions of data democratization through real-world applications that maximize the return on investment in marketing budget allocation.

María Teresa Ballestar, an associate professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid (Spain), has over 25 years of experience in data analysis and leadership across diverse sectors. She has led data science teams in IT consultancy, banking, pharmaceuticals, and Big Tech. Her professional background includes significant roles at companies like Cetelem, ING, Merck Sharp & Dohme, and Google.

Her research effectively bridges academia and practical business applications, focusing on the impact of data science on e-commerce, public policy, and digital transformation. She holds a B.A. in Statistics, an M.Sc. in Marketing & Market Research, an M.A. in Information and Knowledge Society, and a Ph.D. in Applied Economics.

28.8.2024 Seumas Miller

Cybersecurity, Ethics and Collective Responsibility

The advent of the Internet, exponential growth in computing power, and rapid developments in artificial intelligence have raised numerous cybersecurity-related ethical problems in various domains. For instance, there is the threat to liberal democracy posed by the tsunami of disinformation and computational propaganda. A key element of the response to this latter threat is, I argue, the identification of collective moral responsibilities to combat this threat and the institutional embedding of these collective moral responsibilities in the form, for instance, of various interrelated institutional agencies, roles and processes e.g., in the news media, universities, social media companies and other ‘epistemic institutions’, that can function as 'webs of prevention' against cyberattacks.

Seumas Miller is a Professor of Philosophy at Charles Sturt University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author or coauthor of 22 books and over 250 academic articles.

Recommended pre-reading: Cybersecurity, Ethics and Collective Responsibility, Chapter 3 Section 3.3 and Chapter 7 Section 7.1 (link to PDF).