In the mid-March , there was the title’s conference ‘Digital humaniora i Norden’ at Oslo, Norway. For the program there were 125 proposals for presentation and posters, where 79 and 13 were accepted. From the presentations from Finnish organizations, there were 13 presentations, consisting of 1 session, 10 papers and 2 posters.
Tekniska föreningens i Finland förhandlingar, 01.01.1880, no. 1, p. 6 at http://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/aikakausi/binding/1131906/articles/ 1843678#?page=6 National Library’s Digital Collections
| Type | Title | Organization |
| session | Ett komplett arbetsflöde för två digitala utgåvor | Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland |
| paper | Narrative Approaches to the Digitalization of Participatory Urban Planning: Bringing Plot and Metaphor to PPGIS methods | University of Tampere, Aalto University |
| paper | Finländska klassikerbiblioteket – finländsk litteratur i det digitala landskapet | University of Helsinki |
| paper | Nordic Englishes on Twitter | University of Oulu |
| paper | Historians digging in the text mine. Exploring blended close & distant reading of technical journals to understand Finnish history of industrialization, 1880-1910 | Aalto University, University of Turku |
| paper | Counterfactual history in simulation video games: a methodological approach to studying historical consciousness | University of Helsinki |
| paper | Dealings with Uneven Corpus – Experiences from the Use of a Difficult Research Data | University of Helsinki |
| paper | Assessing lexical quality of a digitized historical Finnish newspaper collection with modern language technology tools | National Library of Finland |
| paper | Unlocking a Finnish Social Media – In Search of Citizen Mindscapes | University of Helsinki |
| paper | Travelling TexTs: A HERA financed five countries project from the point of view of its Finnish team | University of Turku |
| paper | Teaching Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki | University of Helsinki, Aalto University |
| poster | Classical Intertextuality in Late Greek Poetry: a Computational Approach | University of Helsinki |
| poster | SEMATIA: Linguistic Annotation of Greek Papyri | University of Helsinki |
National Library of Finland at DHN16
NLF also was presenting at DHN16, with talk about “assessing lexical quality of a digitized historical Finnish newspaper collection with modern language technology tools”, for this we went through the material within http://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi texts and evaluated those with both Omorfi and FINTWOL. We tried to find the most often used words and check their status, to help, in the long run, finding ways to improve the text quality. After running the relatively easy-to-use, that the range of the quality of the digi varies:
that the collection has a relatively good quality part (at least 1/3, probably up to 40–50 %) and a very bad quality part (at least about 10–20%)
These metrics can be useful in evaluating whether the experimented corrections take the whole collection to the good direction. In improvements we are thinking the usefulness of the material to the researchers, as there are attempts to do further analysis of the materials in different fields.
University of Helsinki at DHN16
UH was also well presented in the conference in Oslo. The system, known as Klassikkokirjasto or Klassikerbiblioteket was presented, and how the new web system could serve many different kinds of people from researchers to general public. Klassikkokirjasto was built in collaboration between National Library of Finland, University of Helsinki and Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies.
Anssi Kanner had also utilized the digital collections of National Library of Finland, and he talked about how to deal with uneven corpus, and the challenges which Kettunen et. al. were measuring and how he had approached some fix ideas.
There was also presentation from Aalto University and University of Turku about the using technical journals to understand Finnish history of industrialization, 1880-1910. All technical journals have not been digitized by NLF, but there was still enough in e.g. the digitized Swedish-language Finnish engineering journal, which enabled them to check the feasibility to go forwards and do first experiments. Digitization of historical materials can then seen to have increase the materials versatility for research, beside using the analog materials.
Digital humanism is also in the rise in Finland. This is expressed also by the new digital humanism curriculum, which was the topic of the paper of Mikko Tolonen, Maija Paavolainen (UH) and Eetu Mäkelä (Aalto). As they say “Open access, and open science are a core principle of all of our DH activities”. This ideology is being implemented to teaching via Helsinki DH centre (HELDIG) co-operation and collaboration outside UH, and finding ways to integrate DH research within. For example, the incoming Digital Humanities Hackathon 2016, is also one example case of this ongoing work.
More information
The full papers can be found via links in the conference program. In addition, the book of abstracts give a good summary of all the talks in one go.