Spotlight on Helsinki DHH: Hidden Traces of Europe’s Difficult Past

DARIAH is delighted to publish the fourth Spotlight article Hidden Traces of Europe’s Difficult Past: Spotlight on Helsinki DHH. This article is part of the DARIAH Spotlight campaign, a monthly series that focuses on digital scholarship within the DARIAH network.

Written by Inés Matres and Mengdi Zhang (University of Helsinki), this article is a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon through the lenses of a participant and a team leader shining a spotlight on two projects from the latest DHH25 that delved into two historical areas, colonialism and the Holocaust, following traces in newspapers (for the former) and oral histories (for the latter) via machine learning, LLMs, and digital methods.

The Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon (DHH) is an award-winning event welcoming every year approximately 40 students in humanities and social sciences to collaborate with computer scientists and develop a project from start to finish in ten days. The true objective of this hackathon is to show students the value added in collaboration while encouraging them to address real humanities questions and problems through the application of innovative methods and data approaches.

This year the Hackathon offered four thematic areas but as both authors of this Spotlight article have a shared interest in historical data, they chose to delve into two projects that focused on European events that had a global impact which continues to the present day: Colonialism and the Holocaust.