University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki DARIAH node is distributed in diverse units in the city centre campus, with ample methodological expertise and curriculum development in digital humanities and social data science.
Website
Contact
Inés Matres
Department of Digital Humanities
Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies
Expertise
Affiliated Groups
Helsinki Computational History Group (COMHIS) 
Helsinki Computational History Group (COMHIS) is an interdisciplinary team that studies intellectual history. The work in the group is guided by methods from various different backgrounds ranging from modern data science and machine learning to history and linguistics.
Expertise
Contact
DARIAH node
The Human Sciences – Computing Interaction (HSCI)
The research group seeks to figure out the technological, processual and theoretical underpinnings of successful computational research in the humanities and social sciences.
Expertise
Contact
DARIAH node
Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH)
The institute is building a research culture that creates new multidisciplinary and inspiring research collaboration on the City Centre Campus and with partners outside the university. It promotes the renewal of content and methodology in the research fields in social sciences and humanities.
Expertise
Contact
DARIAH node
Centre for Social Data Science (CSDS)
The Centre for Social Data Science (CSDS) cultivates data-intensive quantitative methods for a social-science-anchored response to the datafication and digitalisation of society. CSDS aims to provide comprehensive and methods-focused teaching for students in the Contemporary Societies (COS) Masters Programme. The centre engages in collaborative research projects in fields such as, demography, sociology, and social policy to improve applied research methods, and propel such work into the future through suitable, robust, and ethical research infrastructure.
Expertise
Contact
Matti Nelimarkka (2025), Maria Valaste (2026-)
DARIAH node
Tools
This resource provides a set of easy-to-use tools for conducting qualitative analysis on survey responses in Finnish. Thanks to this resource, researchers will be able to better understand data retrieved from open-ended questions.
CRAN webpage: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=finnsurveytext
Guidance can be found in the website of the resource.
Tutorial/Demo
Developed by
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Tool to evaluate biases and errors
This resource provides tools for subsetting and evaluating datasets that have not originally been created for research. Thanks to this resource, researchers will be able to robustly explore large datasets, examine their representativeness, and extract the subset they are interested in.
End-user interface links and usage instructions for centrally indexed datasets: https://github.com/hsci-r/elasticsearch-openshift/blob/main/documentation/exported_query.md
Technical documentation enabling people to set up their own instances for their own datasets: https://github.com/hsci-r/elasticsearch-openshift
Resource developed by the University of Helsinki (ARTS) in partnership with the CSC.
Tutorial/Demo
Developed by
Contact
Research Data Management handbooks
A collection of open access digital handbooks for research data management for SSH fields edited by the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities in Spring/Autumn 2024. The five guides cover: Texts, register data, surveys, social media, as well as audiovisual recordings.
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Training and Teaching
Introduction to Digital Humanities and Social Sciences
This is an introductory course that will give you a wide overview of different approaches to digital humanities and social sciences at the University of Helsinki across faculty borders. During the course, students will become familiar with the basic concepts and approaches of digital humanities and social sciences.
Bachelor’s level
Master’s Programme in Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities
An interdisciplinary programme that combines five fields of study: cognitive science, digital humanities, general linguistics, language technology, and phonetics.
Master’s level
Digital Humanities Research Seminar
Established in 2015. Offered every year both in the autumn and the spring.
Doctoral level
Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon (DHH) 
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. The Hackathon admits a limited number of applicants each Spring, 5 ECTS can be gained by students at the University of Helsinki and other universities.
Master’s level; Doctoral level
The Methodological unit at the Helsinki Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (Uni Helsinki) organizes a recurrent 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.
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 and welcome a multidisciplinary and methodologically curious audience. The language of the meetings can be Finnish or English.
This is a hybrid event taking place at the University of Helsinki, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor. For remote participation use this link
Dates for Spring 2026 (subject to updates)
4.2.2026 Salla-Maaria Laaksonen & Erjon Skenderi “Raising a bot: Developing communicative AIs for group discussions”
11.2.2026 Adeline Clarke “Unsupervised methods for image clustering do not yet replace the social scientists’ gaze”
1.4.2026 Henri Schildt (Aalto University) “Qualitative research and AI: From automating coding to augmenting collaboration
Read more about the presenters and abstracts on the event site: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/helsinki-institute-social-sciences-and-humanities/events/brown-bag-seminar