People
The group, led by PI Mikko Tolonen, takes valuable input and contributions from a wide group of people. This page lists currently active COMHIS members and collaborating scholars.
Mikko Tolonen

Mikko Tolonen is an associate professor (tenure track) in digital humanities. His background is in intellectual history and he is the PI of Helsinki Computational History Group. Since 2015 he has been organising the Helsinki Digital Humanities Seminar (#helsinkiDH, link to seminar). He is the subject head of digital humanities and he has designed the DH teaching module at the Faculty of Arts (link: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/helsinki-centre-for-digital-humanities/teaching). His current main research focus is on an integrated study of public discourse and knowledge production that combines metadata from library catalogues as well as full-text libraries of books, newspapers and periodicals in early modern Europe. Tolonen works also in other areas of Enlightenment studies.

Website: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/1f6c4343-d64e-48d5-b6af-39d5f3442502
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikko_tolonen
email: mikko.tolonen@helsinki.fi

Leo Lahti

Leo Lahti is Academy Research Fellow and associate professor in Data Science at University of Turku. He is one of the founding members of Helsinki Computational History Group and has several years of international research experience on life science informatics. His research focuses on theory and applications of modern statistical data analysis.

Website: http://www.iki.fi/Leo.Lahti | twitter: https://twitter.com/antagomir | email: leo.lahti@iki.fi

Eetu Mäkelä

Eetu Mäkelä is a tenure track assistant professor of Human Sciences – Computing Interaction at the University of Helsinki. His interests lie in exploring the challenges complex human data and questions pose for computational algorithms, workflows and tools. These are also the questions he engages with in his work with the computational history group.

Website: http://iki.fi/eetu.makela
twitter: https://twitter.com/jiemakel
Email: eetu.makela@helsinki.fi

Jani Marjanen

Jani Marjanen is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century patriotism, the theory and method of conceptual history, and the development of public discourse. In the Helsinki Computational History Group he works on the analysis of public discourse through quantitative and qualitative analysis of metadata and historical language. He is one of the editors of Contributions to the History of Concepts.

Website: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/bc7769e1-9429-4da6-8ab0-956d655256f5 | twitter: https://twitter.com/janimarjanen | email: jani.marjanen@helsinki.fi

Mark Hill

Mark is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki interested in topics both historical (the emergence of the public sphere in 18th century Europe; Jean-Jacques Rousseau's political thought) and methodological (the intersection between intellectual history and digital humanities). Although a traditional historian by training, Mark is also trained in quantitative approaches to historical research - in particular, statistical approaches to historical records, quantitative text analysis, and social network analysis. Before Helsinki Mark was a Fellow in the Government Department at the London School of Economics and completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford.

Website: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/210b9f46-e9b2-416e-b9a1-95ed19aed4c1 | github: https://github.com/markjhill | email: mark.hill@helsinki.fi

Tanja Säily

Assistant Professor in English Language at the University of Helsinki, member of VARIENG (link) and COMHIS. Research interests: corpus linguistics, digital humanities, historical sociolinguistics, English lexis and morphology. Particularly interested in multidisciplinary collaboration on developing tools and methods for the study of language variation and change in its sociocultural contexts.

Website: https://tanjasaily.fi | twitter: https://twitter.com/TanjaSaily | email: tanja.saily@helsinki.fi

Antti Kanner

Antti is doctoral student in Digital Humanities and Finnish Language in University of Helsinki. While a linguist who ventures into computation, he is mostly interested in implications the computational methodologies have on theories of semantics and pragmatics. His dissertation deals with vector space models and distributional semantics.

Ville Vaara

Ville is a doctoral student in History and Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki. He is a historian by training but has picked up coding skills on the way and now applies them to both metadata and large text corpora. His dissertation deals with 18th century history of publishing, networks in booktrade and text reuse.

Website: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/c1d72193-e2a1-47bc-a61e-2ec7fedb4156 | email: ville.vaara@helsinki.fi | github: https://github.com/villevaara

Iiro Tiihonen

Iiro Tiihonen is a graduate student of both general history and mathematics at the University of Helsinki and a research assistant at Comhis. His studies have focused on intellectual history, historical sociology, mathematical analysis and laters applications. He’s especially interested about historical research that builds on well articulated theories and about theories that can be evaluated with historical research.

Harri Lindroos

Harri Lindroos is a doctoral student in history and digital humanities at the University of Helsinki. He is in many ways a very traditional historian working on a thesis concerning the Scottish Enlightenment, but also eager to explore digital methods to support his research. His other scholarly interests include topics such as history of science (natural, moral and social) and history of conservatism.

Email: harri.lindroos@helsinki.fi

Maciej Janicki

Maciej Janicki is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki. He recently obtained his PhD in computer science from the University of Leipzig, Germany and his background is in language technology.

Tuuli Tahko

Tuuli Tahko is a postdoctoral researcher in the project Vernacularization and Nation Building: Historical, Linguistic and Computational Perspectives.

Lassi Saario

Lassi Saario is a doctoral student in philosophy and digital humanities at the University of Helsinki.

Collaborating scholars