My new monograph will be published on 25 September 2026 by Routledge.

This cultural history of thinking machines examines conceptions of the human as an automaton and the possibility of mechanised thought in philosophical and literary works from the seventeenth century to the 1840s, with particular emphasis on the Romantic period.

In the 2020s, there has been no escaping the debate over AI. Yet strong AI remains as much science fiction today as it was in the nineteenth century. Media archaeology has highlighted the ruptures and dead ends of technological development, recovering forgotten and obsolete technologies. Failed and imagined attempts to create thinking machines from Thomas Hobbes to Charles Babbage and from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Edgar Allan Poe not only illuminate their own historical contexts but also reveal the origins of the utopian hopes and dystopian fears that continue to shape responses to mechanised thought. Artificial Intelligence before Computers argues that we can move beyond the Romantic myth of AI only by recognising its historical roots.

Asko Nivala, “British Romanticism and Denmark / Nordic Terrors: Scandinavian Superstition in British Gothic Literature.” European Romantic Review 37 (1) 2026: 117–22. doi:10.1080/10509585.2026.2618862.

The early nineteenth-century bildungsroman is often understood as a coming-of-age story of the protagonist, which implies that temporality is more constitutive for its composition than spatiality. In contrast, my paper focuses on the motif of travelling in German and British bildungsroman narratives. Opposed to the previous allegorical understanding of the Romantic bildungsroman, I suggest that the methods of the spatial humanities open up a new perspective on bildungsroman narratives by showing how their travel itineraries were used in the construction of Europe before and after the Napoleonic Wars. The itineraries annotated from the corpus suggest that the classic Grand Tour to Italy remain important, especially in German Romanticism, whereas northern regions are also popular in British texts. A few narratives emphasise the region of Greece in defining the European frontier in relation to the Ottoman Empire, while Russia and Poland are not popular settings for bildungsroman narratives.

Asko Nivala & Jasmine Westerlund: Suomenkielisten taiteilijaromaanien tilallisuus 1884–1939. Historiallinen Aikakauskirja, 1 / 2024, 4–21.

Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelemme suomenkielisen taiteilijaromaanin tilallisuutta vuosina 1884–1939. Aineistonamme on ihmislukijoiden annotoima paperikortisto, jonka olemme digitoineet tietokannaksi. Tietokantaan sisältyy 70 taiteilijaromaania väliltä 1884–1939, joista 62 teosta sisältää paikkatietoja. Olemme keränneet kortistosta romaanien tapahtumapaikat ja tuoneet ne paikkatietojärjestelmän avulla kartoille. Kartoissa näkyy jännite kaupunkien ja maaseudun, rannikon ja sisämaan sekä pohjoisen ja etelän välillä, jota olemme tutkineet keskuksen ja periferian käsitteiden kautta. Savoa, Lappia, Karjalaa ja Pohjois-Pohjanmaata kuvataan rauhan, kotiinpaluun ja inspiraation alueina. Periferian rooli on kuitenkin monitulkintainen, sillä erityisesti Lappi voidaan kuvata myös kansainvälisesti verkostoituneena alueena, tai maaseutukylät voivat merkitä taiteilijalle myös eristyneisyyden tunnetta ja mahdollisuuksien niukkuutta. Kaupunkien osalta Helsingin paikkoja kuvataan paljon yksityiskohtaisemmin kuin muita alueita, jolloin kartta tulee kaupunginosien, rakennusten ja katujen tasolle. Helsinki esitetään monissa teoksissa myös modernina metropolina. Suomalaisissa taiteilijaromaaneissa ”ikkunat ovat auki Eurooppaan”, mutta romaaneissa kuvattu Eurooppa on varsin läntinen. Aineistoon kuuluu kuitenkin myös matkoja mm. Balkanille ja Neuvostoliittoon. Olemme kehittäneet matkojen tutkimiseen Python-työkalun, joka muuttaa niiden reitit tilalliseksi verkostoksi. Pohdimme artikkelissa myös kirjallisen maantieteen metodologisia ongelmia kuten laajempien alueiden palauttamista pisteiksi. Tilallisen historian käyttämät kartat palauttavat usein tilan kartesiolaiseen koordinaatistoon, mutta rekonstruoimamme matkareittien verkosto pyrkii ylittämään pelkän pistemäisen tavan esittää tilaa.

Harri Kiiskinen, Asko Nivala, Jasmine Westerlund, and Juhana Saarelainen (2023). “Extracting Geographical References from Finnish Literature. Fully Automated Processing of Plain-Text Corpora”. Journal of Computational Literary Studies 2 (1), doi: https://doi.org/10.48694/jcls.3584.

Abstract

In the Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870-1940 project, we extract geographical information from a Finnish-language corpus of literary texts published between 1870 and 1940. The texts are transformed from plain texts to TEI/XML, and further processed with named entity recognition and linking tools. The results are presented in a web-based environment. This article describes the technical structure of the analysis chain, the tools used and the metaprocesses used to manage the research dataset.

In this article, I analyse named entity linking as a new method to study the construction of space in the English and German texts of European Literature, 1790–1840: The Corvey Collection. The Corvey Collection is among the most comprehensive datasets to have survived from the Romantic Era of literature. However, German-language documents in particular suffer from poor OCR scanning. To avoid noise caused by incorrectly digitized characters, I have re-OCRed the collection. In contrast to named entity recognition, named entity linking is able to disambiguate toponyms and find coordinates for them from linked open data sources such as DBpedia. I have then imported the geocoded places to geographic information systems, which enables comparing spaces imagined in British and German literature from the 1790s to the 1840s. To link spatial information to the semantic content of texts, I have applied topic modeling to find common themes shared by the works. Studying the spatial imagination of the popular texts published in the Romantic era discloses an alternative view to our present notion of Romanticism based on the close reading of a few canonized authors. The comparison of English and German corpora shows the way in which the spatial imagination reflected the asymmetrical relationship of center and periphery: the core of British literature was located in London, whereas no single center appears in the German-language data.

Miten kulttuurihistoria tulisi määritellä uusmaterialismin, posthu- manismin ja digitaalisen humanismin avatessa uusia näköaloja? Miten uudet suuntaukset rinnastuvat toisiinsa? Osoitan tässä artikkelissa, että digitaalisilla ihmistieteillä on positivismin sijasta runsaasti yhteistä uusmaterialismin ja posthumanismin kanssa, vaikka näitä suuntauksia ajatellaan usein erillisinä ja toisinaan jopa vastakkaisina.

Asko Nivala, “Kulttuurihistoria, uusmaterialismi, posthumanismi ja digitaalinen humanismi”. Teoksessa Kulttuurihistorian tutkimus: Lähteistä menetelmiin ja tulkintaan. Toim. Rami Mähkä, Marika Ahonen, Niko Heikkilä, Sakari Ollitervo & Marika Räsänen. k & h, Turku 2022, 453–467.

Linking large digitized newspaper corpora in different languages that have become available in national and state libraries opens up new possibilities for the computational analysis of patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries. The significant contribution this article presents is to demonstrate how word vector models can be used to explore the way concepts have shifted in meaning over time, as they migrated across space, by comparing newspapers from different countries published between 1840 and 1914. We define a concept, rather pragmatically, as a key term or core idea that has been used in historical discourse: an abstraction or mental representation that has served as a building block for thoughts and beliefs. We use historical newspapers in English, Finnish, German and Swedish from collections in the UK, US, Germany, and Finland, as well as the Europeana collection. As use cases, we analyze how the different conceptual constructs of “nation” and “illness” emerged and changed between 1840 and 1920. Conceptual change over time is simulated by creating a series of overlapping word vector models, each spanning ten years. Historical vocabularies are retrieved on the basis of vector space proximity. Conceptual change across space is simulated by comparing the historical change of vocabularies in newspaper collections from different nations in several languages. This computational approach to conceptual history opens up new ways to identify patterns in public discourse over longer periods of time and across borders.

Asko Nivala: ”Friedrich Schlegel and the Mystical Kingdom of God.” Mystik und Romantik. Eds. Günther Bonheim, Thomas Isermann & Thomas Regehly. Brill, Leiden 2021, 69–88.

Friedrich Hölderlinin Hyperion on kirjeromaani, jota on tavattu lukea sen päähenkilön ke- hityskertomuksena. Värikkäistä maisemakuvauksistaan tunnettu teos sijoittuu 1770-luvun Kreikkaan. Jos Hyperionia luetaan tilallisesti, millaisen kuvan se piirtää Kreikan alueesta?

Asko Nivala: “Kreikan alue Friedrich Hölderlinin Hyperionissa” niin & näin, Nro 4, 2021, 77–87, OPEN ACCESS.