PI: Asko Nivala

Machine learning and neural networks have developed significantly during the twenty-first century. Despite the success of weak artificial intelligence, strong AI – the creation of an artificial consciousness comparable with humans – is still as much science fiction as it was when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein (1818). My research project Artificial Intelligence Before Computers (AICOM) explores the history of AI discourse before the invention of the electronic computer. The utopia of a thinking machine is based on computationalism, which argues that human mind operates like a computer. As a philosophical idea, computationalism is much older than computing hardware: already Thomas Hobbes and G. W. Leibniz maintained that all reasoning is reducible to addition and subtraction.

PI: Asko Nivala

Project website

What kind of geographical areas have been imagined in Finnish literature? What kind of maps do the classics of our literature draw? Where are the centres and peripheries of Finnish literature? Literary cartography emerged in the late 1990s as part of the spatial turn in the humanities. In the 2000s, it has adopted the methods of digital humanities, combining the processing of natural languages with geographic information system. The Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870-1940 project applies these new methods for the first time to the study of Finnish fiction.

PI: Asko Nivala

Most texts are spatial implying a network of places. This was especially typical of the Romantic era (1790s–1840s) that was characterised by the growing interest in historical and natural sites. Romantic Cartographies was a digital humanities project that provided new interpretations on English and German Romantic texts by focusing on spatiality. It analysed the spatiality of Romantic texts by reconstructing the various maps they implied. The geoparsing method developed during the project enabled mining locational data from an exceptionally big textual corpus. The results of text mining was visualised as superimposed maps, which produced new knowledge about the relationship of centre and periphery, or urban and natural areas in Romanticism.

PI: Prof. Hannu Salmi

The consortium Computational History and the Transformation of Public Discourse in Finland, 1640–1910 (funded by the Academy of Finland programme on Digital Humanities, 2016–2019) is based on the cooperation of four partners: The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Helsinki, the Departments of Cultural History and Future Technologies at the University of Turku and the Centre for Preservation and Digitisation of the National Library of Finland. This brings together relevant complementary expertise on the research subject (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history), methodology (computational sciences and language technology) and data (the preservation and enhancement of digital resources). The objective of the consortium is to reassess the scope, nature, development, and transnational connections of public discourse in Finland, 1640–1910.

PI: Asko Nivala

I defended my doctoral dissertation in 2015. It discussed the themes of the Golden Age and the Kingdom of God in Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) early thought. The project was funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Oskar Öflund Foundation. In the final stages of the research work, I was also working in the Travelling Notions of Culture project, funded by the Academy of Finland.

A monograph based on my PhD dissertation was published in February 2017 with the title The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophy of History. In addition to that, I have published many research articles about Friedrich Schlegel.

PI: Prof. Hannu Salmi

The project Travelling Notions of Culture, funded by the Academy of Finland 2012–2016 and supervised by Prof. Hannu Salmi, studied the changing notions of culture by asking how spatial imagination contributed to defining the concepts of culture and civilisation in early nineteenth-century Europe.

The research results of the project were published in the edited collection Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe. Eds. Hannu Salmi, Asko Nivala, Jukka Sarjala. Routledge, New York 2015.

In 2012–2013, I was working as the coordinator of Aboagora: Between Arts and Sciences and was responsible for the organisation of the multidisciplinary Aboagora symposium together with the organisational committee.

Aboagora 2013: The Human Machine

Abogora 2013: The Human Machine was organised on August 13-15 and focused on the complex relationships between man and machine. The keynote speakers were Bruce Sterling, Kevin Warwick, Mia Consalvo and Timo Airaksinen.

Aboagora 2012: The Power of the Sacred and the Secular

Abogora 2012: The Power of the Sacred and the Secular was held on August 14-16. I had a great pleasure to meet inspiring keynote speakers such as the philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the historian Miri Rubin.