Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon 2025

As a CLARIN and DARIAH summer school, Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon #DHH25 is truly international, welcoming applications from all over Europe and beyond!

The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon is a chance to experience an interdisciplinary research project from start to finish within the span of 10 days. For researchers and students from computer science and data science, the hackathon gives the opportunity to test their abstract knowledge against complex real-life problems. For people from the humanities and social sciences, it shows what is possible to achieve with such collaboration.

For both, the hackathon gives the experience of intensely working with people from different backgrounds as part of an interdisciplinary team, as, during the hackathon, each group develops a digital humanities research project from start to finish. Working together, they formulate research questions with respect to particular data sets, develop and apply methods and tools to answer them, and present the work at the end of the hackathon.

5 ECTS credits may be gained from participating in the hackathon for students at the University of Helsinki and other universities.

Themes

This year, the hackathon groups are organised around the following four themes:

• Parliaments beyond borders: Exploring the Role of Foreign Nations in National Policy Debates
• Digital Presence in Physical Absence: Survivors’ Testimonies and Holocaust Oral History
• Rare Earth & Web Discourses: Parallel Mining Approaches
• Economic bubbles, consumerism, and the colonies: Early modern newspapers as indicators of economic change in 18th century society

See further information here.

Prac­tic­al­it­ies and Timetable

The hackathon will take place between 14.–23.5.2025. The participants are expected to commit to the hackathon for the whole period; work takes place mainly between 10 AM and 5 PM on weekdays (the weekend is free!). In addition, there are two online pre-sessions on Tuesdays 29.4. and 6.5., between 2 – 4 PM UTC+03:00 for orientation, group formation and preparation for the intensive hackathon period. The participants are expected to attend also these pre-sessions. For more details, see the detailed timetable and further information on practicalities (including prerequisites and credits for students, spon­sor­ship of travel and ac­com­mod­a­tion for international participants).

23.5.2025 13:00–16:00, Minerva Plaza, Siltavuorenpenger 5 A, room K226
Public presentations of the projects.
The event will be streamed at https://video.helsinki.fi/unitube/live-stream.html?room=l5

Or­gan­isa­tion

General organisers:

• Mikko Tolonen, professor in computational history at the University of Helsinki
• Eetu Mäkelä, professor in human sciences – computing interaction at the University of Helsinki
• Jukka Suomela, associate professor in distributed algorithms, logic and complexity at Aalto University
• Jouni Tuominen, university researcher at HSSH, University of Helsinki