The main research objective of the group is 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.
A list of most recent works published by COMHIS members is available at the bottom of this page.
Projects
COMHIS is involved in several projects representing different areas of expertise. These projects include:
- Computational History and the Transformation of Public Discourse in Finland, 1640–1910, (national consortium)
- NewsEye, an H2020-funded project aiming to study newspapers (link to NewsEye).
- The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon, a yearly event held at the University of Helsinki, which aims to lock people (from the BA to the prof level, from heterogenous backgrounds) up for 8 days until a proper academic poster can be presented (link to DHH).
- Vernacularization and Nation Building: Historical, Linguistic and Computational Perspectives (2019-2021, University of Helsinki 3-year grant)
Data releases
COMHIS is committed to the principles of open science. When possible, we release the datasets and code used for our research projects. These will be updated soon.
Research output
Forthcoming
Tolonen, M., Hill, M., Ijaz A., Vaara, V., & Lahti, L. (Forthcoming). Examining the Early Modern Canon: The English Short Title Catalogue and Large-Scale Patterns of Cultural Production. In: Baird, I. (ed.). Data Visualization in Eighteenth-Century Studies. London: Routledge.
Vaara, V., Ijaz, A., Tiihonen, I., Hengchen, S., Kanner, A., Säily, T., & Lahti, L. (Forthcoming). The Emerging Paradigm of Bibliographic Data Science. In: Proceedings of the Digital Humanities conference (DH2019).
2019
Daems, J., D’haeninck, T., Hengchen, S., Zere, T., & Verbruggen, C. (2019). 'Workers of the World’? A Digital Approach to Classify the International Scope of Belgian Socialist Newspapers, 1885–1940. Journal of European Periodical Studies, 99-114. https://ojs.ugent.be/jeps/article/view/10187
Dubossarsky, H., Hengchen, S., Tahmasebi, N., & Schlechtweg, D. (2019). Time-Out: Temporal Referencing for Robust Modeling of Lexical Semantic Change. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-1044/
Hill, M. J. & Hengchen, S. (2019). Quantifying the impact of dirty OCR on historical text analysis: Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a case study. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqz024/5476122
Hill, M. J., Vaara, V., Säily, T., Lahti, L., & Tolonen, M. (2019). Reconstructing Intellectual Networks: From the ESTC’s bibliographic metadata to historical material. In: Navarretta, C., Agirrezabal, M. and Maegaard, B. (eds.). Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, March 5–8, 2019. Aachen: CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 2364: 201-219. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/19_paper.pdf [Best paper award]
Ijaz, A., Tolonen, M., & Lahti, L. (2019). Analytical determination of editions from bibliographic metadata. In: Jantunen, J. H. et al. (eds.). Proceedings of the Research data and humanities (RDHUM) 2019 conference: data, methods and tools. Studia Humaniora Ouluensia 17. Oulu: University of Oulu. 9–19. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:9789526223216
Lahti, L., Marjanen, J., Roivainen, H., & Tolonen, M. (2019). Bibliographic Data Science and the History of the Book (c. 1500–1800). Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 57(1): 5–23. DOI: 10.1080/01639374.2018.1543747
Lahti, L., Vaara, V., Marjanen, J., & Tolonen, M. (2019). Best Practices in Bibliographic Data Science. In: Jantunen, J. H. et al. (eds.). Proceedings of the Research data and humanities (RDHUM) 2019 conference: data, methods and tools. Studia Humaniora Ouluensia 17. Oulu: University of Oulu. 57–65. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:9789526223216
Marjanen, J. (2019). Gränserna för det offentliga samtalet i Finland 1809–1863. In: Hemstad, R. & Michalsen, D. (eds.). Frie ord i Norden? Offentlighet, ytringsfrihet og medborgerskap i Norden 1814–1914. Oslo: Pax. 111–140.
Marjanen, J. (2019). What’s the frequency, Kenneth? NewsEye blog, 25 June, 2019. https://www.newseye.eu/blog/news/what-s-the-frequency-kenneth/
Marjanen, J., Pivovarova, L., Zosa, E., & Kurunmäki, J. (2019). Clustering Ideological Terms in Historical Newspaper Data with Diachronic Word Embeddings. In: Wevers, M. et al. (eds.) The 5th International Workshop on Computational History (HistoInformatics 2019), Oslo, Norway, September 12th, 2019. Aachen: CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 2461: 21–29. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2461/paper_4.pdf
Marjanen, J., Vaara, V., Kanner, A., Roivainen, H., Mäkelä, E., Lahti, L., & Tolonen, M. (2019). A National Public Sphere? Analyzing the Language, Location, and Form of Newspapers in Finland, 1771–1917. Journal of European Periodical Studies 4(1): 54–77. DOI: 10.21825/jeps.v4i1.10483
Mäkelä, E., Tolonen, M., Marjanen, J., Kanner, A., Vaara, V., & Lahti, L. (2019). Interdisciplinary collaboration in studying newspaper materiality. In: Krauwer, S. and Fišer, D. (eds.). Proceedings of the Twin Talks Workshop, co-located with Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN 2019). Aachen: CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 2365: 55–66. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2365/07-TwinTalks-DHN2019_paper_7.pdf
Pivovarova, L., Marjanen, J., & Zosa, E. (2019). Word Clustering for Historical Newspapers Analysis. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology for Digital Historical Archives, Varna, Bulgaria, 5 September, 2019.
Tiihonen, I., Vaara, V., Lahti, L., & Tolonen, M. (2019). Scalable Analysis of Printers of Early Modern Britain by a Semi-automated Curation Process. Poster presented at the 6th DH Benelux Conference, 11 – 13 September 2019, Liège, Belgium. [pdf]
Tolonen, M. (2019). Teaching Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki. Europe Now, 9 September 2019. https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/09/09/teaching-digital-humanities-at-the-university-of-helsinki/
Tolonen, M. & Lahti, L. (2019). Integrating open science in the humanities: the case of computational history. Springer Nature Data Dialogues, 26 November 2019. https://go.nature.com/2QS3WoH
Tolonen, M., Lahti, L., Roivainen, H., & Marjanen, J. (2019). A Quantitative Approach to Book-Printing in Sweden and Finland, 1640–1828. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 52(1): 57-78. DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2018.1526657
Tolonen, M., Marjanen, J., Roivainen, H., & Lahti, L. (2019). Scaling up bibliographic data science. In: Navarretta, C., Agirrezabal, M. and Maegaard, B. (eds.). Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, March 5–8, 2019. Aachen: CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 2364: 450–456. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/41_paper.pdf
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Better Science through Better Data, November 2019, #scidata19:
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DH2019 Conference: Contributions.
2018
Hengchen, S., Kanner, A., Marjanen, J., & Mäkelä, E. (2018). Comparing Topic Model Stability Between Finnish, Swedish, English and French. Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries, 07/03/2018 - 09/03/2018.
Kurunmäki, J. & Marjanen, J. (2018). A Rhetorical View of Isms: An Introduction. Journal of Political Ideologies, 23(3), 241-255. DOI:10.1080/13569317.2018.1502939
Kurunmäki, J. & Marjanen, J. (2018). Begreppshistoria. In G. Bergström & K. Boréus (Eds.), Textens mening och makt: Metodbok i samhällsvetenskaplig textanalys (4th ed., pp. 169-204). Lund: Studentlitteratur AB.
Kurunmäki, J. & Marjanen, J. (2018). Isms, Ideologies and Setting the Agenda for Public Debate. Journal of Political Ideologies, 23(3), 256-282. DOI:10.1080/13569317.2018.1502941
Lahti, L., Vaara, V., Marjanen, J., Roivainen, H., Ijaz, A., Hengchen, S., Tiihonen, I., Säily, T., Kanner, A., Hill, M. J., Mäkelä, E., & Tolonen, M. (2018). Quantitative analysis of public discourse in Europe 1470-1910. Digital Humanities Benelux (DH Benelux 2018), Amsterdam, Netherlands, 06/06/2018 - 08/06/2018.
Marjanen, J. (2018). Editorial: Ism Concepts in Science and Politics. Contributions to the History of Concepts, 13(1), v-ix. DOI:10.3167/choc.2018.130101
Marjanen, J. (2018). Begreppshistoria. In M. Gustavsson & Y. Svanström (Eds.), Metod: Guide för historiska studier (pp. 95-130). Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Tolonen, M., Kanner, A., Marjanen, J., Vaara, V., Hill, M. J., Mäkelä, E., & Lahti, L. (2018). Spheres of “public” in eighteenth-century Britain. Digital humanities in the Nordic Countries DHN2018, Helsinki, Finland, 07/03/2018 - 09/03/2018.
Tolonen, M., Mäkelä, E., Marjanen, J., Kanner, A., Lahti, L., Ginter, F., Salmi, H., Vesanto, A., Nivala, A., Rantala, H., & Sippola, R. (2018). Metadata Analysis and Text Reuse Detection: Reassessing public discourse in Finland through newspapers and journals 1771–1917. Digital humanities in the Nordic Countries DHN2018, Helsinki, Finland, 07/03/2018 - 09/03/2018.
Tolonen, M., Vaara, V., & Vesanto, A. (2018). Text reuse and Eighteenth-Century Histories of England. Digital humanities in the Nordic Countries DHN2018, Helsinki, Finland, 07/03/2018 - 09/03/2018, pp. 178-186.
2017
Tolonen, M., Marjanen, J., Kanner, A., Mäkelä, E., Lahti, L., Vaara, V., Roivainen, H., Tarkka-Robinson, L., & Lähteenoja, V. (2017). OCTAVO – Analysing Early Modern Public Communication. Poster presented at Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.