The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon (DHH) began 10 years ago as an experiment that developed into an annual experience to develop an interdisciplinary research project from start to finish within the span of 10 days. It is organised as a master’s level university course and an international summer school every year.
A decade ago it seemed that there was a gap between humanities, DH and CS. We thought a new type of hackathon would be an ideal bridge. DHH gives the opportunity to test abstract knowledge against complex real-life problems. Bridging disciplinary boundaries is the core of DHH: data scientists and humanities scholars join forces to tackle complex research questions together.
From the beginning, we have targeted researchers and students from various backgrounds, including humanities, social sciences, computer science and data science, who wish to collaborate on an interdisciplinary research project.
The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon has been running yearly since 2015*, starting as a five-credit master’s level course as part of the Digital Humanities minor subject at the University of Helsinki. It subsequently became part of the Digital Humanities MA study track. The course is also offered separately as part of the data science master’s program and at Aalto University for students of computer science. Since 2019, the hackathon has been organised as a DARIAH and CLARIN summer school, welcoming participants from all over Europe and beyond.
For ten days, participants work in groups organised around predefined themes. Each interdisciplinary team develops a project from start to finish, fusing computational strategies with humanistic perspectives. Working together, they will 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. This collaboration demonstrates how theoretical and interpretive skills and computation strengthen each other. During the hackathon, students acquire skills that will be useful to them regardless of whether they are thinking about an academic career or aiming to find a job outside academia.
* In the year 2020 the hackathon was not organised due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon was first organised in 2015 on a shoestring budget and very little planning. In subsequent years, DHH attracted a global audience in becoming a recognised European digital humanities event as a DARIAH and CLARIN summer school. DHH has also received international acclaim in the form of rewards.
During the hackathon’s ten-year history, every year approximately 50 attendees (including ca. 40 participants, and one to three team leaders per group) and four main organisers, have been involved in the hackathon, totalling 600 people, with over 100 people from outside Finland. Risto Turunen, who participated in the hackathon for the first time in 2015, and has since become a group leader, commented that “DHH is the best thing humanists can do with their pants on”. At DHH, the participants have the opportunity to receive five ECTS credits for the completion of the hackathon. The feedback on the hackathon we have received over the years has been overwhelmingly positive.
As one of the participants put it: “The best part was the time we had to get into the topic of our research and explore the dataset. Having this time to work together on ideas, to try out things of which some worked out and others didn’t and to come to actual results was something I did not expect in the beginning. I think the length of the Hackathon is truly ideal.”
Every year, team members present their work in a public event on the last day of the hackathon. The presentation materials of the groups are available online for several years, and the recorded presentations from 2019. As concrete outputs, each hackathon group has produced a poster or a report (in 2021 when the hackathon was organised as an online event) that summarises the group’s work during the hackathon. The blog posts groups have written are published online. Source code, datasets, and other accompanying materials the groups have created are available on public GitHub repositories. Additionally, some student reports on the hackathon have been published.
The hackathon has proven to be a venue for catalysing further research initiatives. One such initiative was the 2017 group “The media and the political elite”, and later Research Council of Finland funding was received for the FLOPO project (2019–2022). Scientific publications stemming from the hackathon include the results of the 2017 group “Categories, norms and genres – critical readings in numbers” [1], 2019 group “Newspapers and Capitalism” [2], and 2022 group “Parliamentary networks” [3]. Reflections on organising the hackathon (and digital humanities studies at the University of Helsinki in general) have been discussed in articles [4, 5].
[1] Agata Dominowska, Elsi Hyttinen, Peter Ivanics, Mikko Koho, Ilona Pikkanen and Risto Turunen. 2019. “Hiding in Plain Sight: Poetry in Newspapers and How to Approach it.” Human IT: Journal for Information Technology Studies as a Human Science, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 145–171, University of Borås. https://humanit.hb.se/article/view/594/725
[2] Ruben Ros and Sarah Oberbichler. 2020. “The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon.” Twin Talks: Understanding and Facilitating Collaboration in Digital Humanities 2020. Proceedings of the Twin Talks 2 and 3 Workshops at DHN 2020 and DH 2020: 66–74. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2717/paper07.pdf
[3] Jure Skubic, Jan Angermeier, Alexandra Bruncrona, Bojan Evkoski and Larissa Leiminger. 2022. “Networks of Power: Gender analysis in selected European parliaments.” Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Political Text Analysis (CPSS-2022), Potsdam, Germany. https://old.gscl.org/en/arbeitskreise/cpss/cpss-2022/workshop-proceedings-2022
[4] Mikko Tolonen. 2019 “Teaching Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki.” EuropeNow. https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/09/09/teaching-digital-humanities-at-the-university-of-helsinki/
[5] Mikko Tolonen, Eetu Mäkelä, Jani Marjanen and Tuuli Tahko. 2020. “Arvutiteaduse kaasamine humanitaarharidusse.” Methis : studia humaniora Estonica, 21:26, 35-50. https://doi.org/10.7592/methis.v21i26.16909
