Blog post author: Inés Matres
The ninth edition of the Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon took place between May 15-24 2024 and had 42 participants. This summer school is organised yearly by HELDIG at the University of Helsinki, in collaboration with HSSH – the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), and Computer Science department at Aalto University.
The Hackathon and the participation of 14 international students was sponsored by CLARIN-ERIC – European Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure and DARIAH-ERIC –the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.
Taking as background its coincidence with the yearly European music contest, Eurovision made its first appearance in DHH offering a theme as well as a friendly-competitive atmosphere that has become a seal of quality and fuel for creativity in this hackathon. The DHH is a different kind of summer school where students and PhD researchers from humanities, social sciences, computer and data science come together for an intense period of ten days to experience a DH project from start to finish.
As each year, participants were offered a series of datasets and thematic approaches, carefully curated by a team of 10 researchers challenging teams to pose and solve their own research questions:
- Enlightening illustrations: Analysing the role of images in Early Modern luxury books
- Eurovision Song Contest
- Democracy through parliamentary speeches
- Cultures of Online Discourse
On the final day, the essence of a digital humanities hackathon was captured by two participants who were invited to reflect about their experience. One participant with experience in hard science hackathons admitted,
this is different, this is not just hacking, here I could experience both sides, and I found myself enjoying pondering what luxury could mean for 18th century folk.
Another recognised that the secret of this Hackathon was trust and collaboration:
even if one does not have a clear view of what is going on at all times or on all fronts, everybody was very open to explain.
These comments reflect the core goal of DHH, to collaboratively explore uncharted academic terrain.
The best way to showcase the results of the projects are the posters that teams have to produce in parallel to hard coding, re-routing failed hypotheses and discussions. DHH posters offer the most suitable way for teams to document their process alongside showcasing original research.
Themes, results and group members
1. “Fairytales, Wild Dances & Hard-rock Hallellujah” Identifying Eurovision Success Between 2004-2024
This group examined the recipe for success from the last 20 years ESC. Their data: song metadata from EurovisionWorld, voting data from EBU (European Broadcasting Union), YouTube videos of performances and metadata collected from Spotify and YouTube. Their approach to success: song themes, performance visuals such as colours, darkness and pyrotechnics, voting and popularity networks of artists. The group found that these elements, if uniquely combined, contain the secret recipe for success in this musical camp classic.
Poster: eurovision.pdf
Participants: Andrew Armstrong, Anna Barišņikova, Beiqianrui He, Emilija Vučićević, Johanne Emilie Christensen, Jonas Berg, Nasti Pelvo, Stanislava Paunović, Virpi Sumu, Xuancheng Pan
Team leads: Antti Kanner & David Rosson
2. Early Modern Luxury Books
This group revealed that luxury is a theoretically tricky concept. Their data: Book metadata and illustrations from the catalogue of the Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO) and book prices from the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). They identified luxurious editions through a combination of variables derived from the materiality of books: from prices, book formats, printing techniques, and image quality and density. Achieving a similar finding as the previous group, through combining these proxies one could be near what Hume would judge as “a great refinement in the gratification of the senses”.
Poster: luxury.pdf
Participants: Aytac Yurukcu, Chao Wang, Ching-Han Kuo, Enes Yılandiloğlu, Jaakko Santavuori, Juho Hotari, Luana Moraes Costa, Marika Fox, Minna Ahokas, Prince Kumar
Team leads: Kira Hinderks, Ari Vesalainen & Iiro Tiihonen
3. Temples of Democracy: Values, Threats And Levers
This group examined parliamentary speeches from 2000 to 2023 from the CLARIN ParlaMint corpus. Their discourse analysis focused on “democracy”, coding and examining cases when it is used as a value, is said to be threatened or is evaluated. The team conducted a comparative approach across countries (UK, Slovenia and the Ukraine) and political parties, indicating that this could be a productive approach when examined against specific historical events.
Poster: parliament.pdf
Participants:Vaibhav Agarwal, Kai Ferragallo-Hawkins, Matthes Fürst, Ekaterina Glazacheva, Marko Milošev, Elma Nevala, Niklas Oetken̈, Tuukka Puonti, Olli Rousu, Artur Voit-Antal, Johan Wahlsten
Team leads: Hugo Bonin, Jani Marjanen & Risto Turunen
4. In search of civility Online
The last group examined discussion forum data from Reddit, taking as example the r/ChangeMyView community that joins people open to change their mind on things. The group asked, what does civil discourse look like on the Internet and where can it be found? Their work included meticulous coding and analysis of interventions, retrieving a sound code of conduct and research methodology to identify, evaluate and promote genuine civility.
Poster: disc.pdf
Participants:Ylva Biri, Yichen Du, Hibiki Ito, Nan Jiang, Kärt Kaal, Charlotte Panušková, Marina Pavlova, Niko Petjakko, Heljä Räisänen, Natchanun Sanitdee, Samuli Veikkolainen
Team leads: Eetu Mäkelä & Ümit Bedretdin
As a closing remark to this event, Martin Wyne, linguist and national coordinator of CLARIN UK tuned in from Oxford as international jury. He praised the original research design and questions of the groups, he reminded of the novelty that is applying DH methods to examine perennial humanities concepts, such as luxury or civility and appreciated that some acknowledged failed routes in their process, as indeed, we learn more from the less positive results.
More information on themes and posters: http://heldig.fi/dhh24
