The Methodological Unit organizes a weekly Brown Bag Seminar to highlight novel methodological approaches in humanities and social sciences. The idea of the meetings is to introduce methodological innovations and cutting-edge research in various disciplines in an easily accessible manner and have an interdisciplinary discussion in an easy-going atmosphere over lunch. Bring your own lunch, we bring fresh methodological topics!
Every Wednesday at 12.00.
Exceptions: No seminar on 6.5.!
You are welcome to join us at room 532, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor, or online via Zoom.
There will be a 20-minute introduction to the methodological theme, followed by an open discussion of 40 minutes. The seminars are open to everybody. We expect a multidisciplinary and methodologically curious audience from different faculties and units of the central campus. The language of the meetings can be Finnish or English.
The most important prerequisite for participation is not methodological expertise, but an open mind towards new methodological innovations and discussion across methodological and disciplinary boundaries.
Scroll down for the upcoming program of Brown Bag Seminars. To get notified on updates sign up for our mailing list or follow us on social media.
Since late 2025, agentic coding tools have exploded. Claude, Codex, Cursor, and a dozen others promising to create software for you. The hype is real, the tools are genuinely powerful, and confusion about how to make these tools useful, especially for social sciences and digital humanities, grows and compounds daily. If you're feeling ambivalent but curious, this talk is for you.
Thanks to the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH) who generously sponsored a yearly subscription of Cursor, I now have some first-hand experience and reflections as a software engineer to report back in the format of a Brown Bag seminar presentation. The topics will touch on vibe coding as a burgeoning cultural phenomenon, the concept of declarative programming with natural language, theoretical aspects of aesthetic judgement and classical control theory.
The talk will be casual and cursory in style to invite discussions from a general audience with no prior technical knowledge required, and serve as a primer to invite thoughts about what LLMs actually do, what kind of machine are we interacting with in this prompting-generative loop, and what kind of opportunities this new mode of human-computer interaction offers for digitally-minded humanities scholars.
David Rosson is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and a member of the Computational History research group at the Department of Digital Humanities. He has a background in laboratory phonology, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. His interdisciplinary work focuses on research infrastructure development and user interface tooling within the context of supporting intellectual historians studying the Enlightenment period.