The HELDIG Summit 2018 was held on the 23rd of October. This year the Summit presented diverse topics about ongoing projects surrounding the Finnish Digital Humanities Infrastructure landscape with the theme “Infrastructures for Digital Humanities”.

During the day we heard about what services are available at the moment and what is still being developed. The day started with an excellent keynote lecture by professor Charles van den Heuvel from Huygens Institute and University of Amsterdam. In his talk “Infrastructures and Interfaces for Digital Humanities Research: Dutch Experiences and Expectations” professor van der Heuvel stressed the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration and data management skills. Digital Humanities is not only interface design, it’s also important to ask the right questions of the data through research.

After this followed 22 presentations, including a short presentation by Ville Rohiola, Anna Wessman and Mikko Koho from SuALT. In the paper we presented the project and its aims shortly.

Anna Wessman, Mikko Koho and Ville Rohiola presented the SuALT project. Photo: Eero Hyvönen.

The outcome of the day hopefully underlined to everyone that digital humanities is a rapidly growing field, and an increasing number of projects are already applying digital methods to their studies. During the Summit it also became clear that there is an enormous potential offered by digitalisation. All the new available methods, techniques and software tools offer advantages that we could not even dream about 10 years ago and the development is rapid. Furthermore, we learned that there is a need for closer collaboration between scholars in the field of Humanities and Computer Science. These new digital projects need deep knowledge of both the source materials and applicable computational methods in order to succeed. That is why it is important that the different disciplines work hard to understand each other.