What does ‘publishing’ mean in the context of a manuscript culture? What did it mean to ‘publish’ a book in Western Europe in the Middle Ages? This project seeks to understand in breadth and depth how Latin authors published original works during the period from c. 1000 to 1500.

The Medieval Publishing project runs from 2017 to 2022 and is led by Samu Niskanen.

Competence is neither necessary nor sufficient for most of the successes we care about. Good outcomes can come about as a result of good luck, and the best, most expert efforts can be thwarted by bad luck. But what about successes like knowledge, rational belief, understanding, and morally right action? Could one, for instance, believe competently, while failing to believe rationally? Or, is there such a thing as incompetent knowing? A core hypothesis of this project is that there is: cases of both competent failure and incompetent success arise for any success we might care about.

The Competence and Success in Epistemology and Beyond runs from 2018 to 2022 and is led by Maria Lasonen-Aarnio.

The aim of the PapyGreek project is to transform the existing digital corpus of Greek documentary papyri so that it yields to computational linguistic methods. This transformation project serves Greek and general historical linguistics, for whom the papyrological material has so far been very difficult to utilize. After the transformation process we can study the linguistic variations in the papyrological material, which again leads to more precise knowledge on the developments of the Greek language.

The PapyGreek project runs from 2018 to 2023 and is led by Marja Vierros.

The success of modern intelligent systems is the ability to learn from data. The goal of the project is to develop models for natural language understanding trained on implicit information given by large collections of human translations. We will apply massively parallel data sets of over a thousand languages to acquire language-independent meaning representations that can be used for reasoning with natural languages and for multilingual neural machine translation.

The Found in Translation project runs from 2018 to 2023 and is led by Jörg Tiedemann.

Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems of 1931 are among the most iconic scientific achievements of the 20th century. Gödel's results led to the development of formal languages and algorithmic computability, upon which the first programming languages and computers were built two decades later. There are still several thousand pages of notes of this remarkable figure in the history of logic, left almost completely untouched, as they were written in an obsolete German stenographic script called Gabelsberger. The central aim of our project is to study these unpublished materials and make them available to future generations of logicians and philosophers.

The Gödel Enigma project runs from 2018 to 2023 and is led by Jan von Plato.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist successor states set about reforming their criminal-justice systems, including prisons, to bring them into line with international and European norms. However, all to a lesser or greater extent still have legacies of the system gestated in the Soviet gulag and exported to East-Central Europe after WWII. These may include the internal organisation of penal space, a collectivist approach to prisoner management, penal labour and, as in the Russian case, a geographical distribution of the penal estate that results in prisoners being sent excessively long distances to serve their sentences. The project will excavate how these legacies interact with other forces, including official and popular discourses, formal policy and individual life histories, to transform, confirm and suppress the ethnic self-identification of prisoners.

The Gulag Echoes project runs from 2018 to 2023 and is led by Judith Pallot.

The Yamnaya Impact project is an international and interdisciplinary effort to understand the massive changes taking place in Europe some 5000 years ago, with its reverberations still visible today when it comes to genetic ancestry, social organisation, and European languages. The project first and foremost deals with the Yamnaya and here the western end of its huge distribution area in the steppe landscapes of current-day countries of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, where also field studies and sample collections will be conducted. The main research objectives address issues such as the funerary archaeology of the Yamnaya kurgans and their material culture; exchange and interaction pattern; physical appearance and population dynamics; mobility, diet, occupation and lifestyle; interplay with the environment; as well as the nature of the wider Yamnaya Impact. Here particularly the transmission of ideas, innovations, customs and genes to regions further to the west and northwest, and thus also the emergence and expansion of the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker complexes, lies in our focus.

The Yamnaya Impact project runs from 2019 to 2023 and is led by Volker Heyd.

This project aims to combine typological and sociolinguistic approaches to language variation. Typological methods are applied to researching complexity of language structures but also to comparing sociolinguistic environments to one another. These innovations enable transforming rich sociolinguistic data to a typology of speech communities and to research if language structures adapt to the sociolinguistic environment in which they are and have been spoken.

The Linguistic Adaptation project runs from 2019 to 2023 and is led by Kaius Sinnemäki.

What did politicians sound like before they were on the radio and television? The fascination with politicians’ vocal characteristics and quirks is often connected to the rise of audio-visual media. But in the age of the printed press, political representatives also had to ‘speak well’ – without recourse to amplification. Historians and linguists have provided sophisticated understandings of the discursive and aesthetic aspects of politicians’ language, but have largely ignored the importance of the acoustic character of their speech. The project studies how vocal performances in parliament have influenced the course of political careers and political decision making in the 19th century.

The Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire project runs from 2018 to 2023 and is led by Josephine Hoegaerts.

The Animals Make Identities: The Social Bioarchaeology of Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic Cemeteries in North-East Europe (AMI) project investigates social links between humans and animals in hunter-gatherer burial sites in North-East Europe, c. 9000–7500 years ago, and aims to understand the social identities of the deceased. The research material derives from almost 300 graves from eight cemeteries in North-East Europe and includes, for example, a unique site in Russia.

The Animals Make Identities project runs from 2020 to 2025 and is led by Kristiina Mannermaa.