Digital humanities (DH) as a research field has been developing rapidly in Finland during the past few years, mainly due to increased funding and profiling activities. Although these infrastructural developments have created (smaller and larger) centres, hubs and clusters related directly or indirectly to digital humanities, the future of Finnish research in this area depends on how the various scholarly and memory organisations, as well as individual scholars, succeed in joining forces. The overall argument in this paper is that digital humanities needs to establish its identity and to create a new space among research cultures with varying characteristics tackling a multitude of problems, and that this can only be achieved through national collaboration and the joint exploitation of the strengths of existing DH hubs. The article sets out a roadmap to this end, providing a detailed discussion of various developments in digital humanities, and analysing different possibilities in the international context. It is based on a survey conducted in 2016 among Finnish scholars in the fields of humanities and the social sciences, an analysis of existing infrastructures, and interviews with DH scholars involved with international top-level DH centres. The focus in the latter part of the article is on these interviews, and on the lessons learned abroad from which the Finnish DH community could benefit. We conclude with a strong call for collaboration to facilitate the further development of the DH field in Finland in response to international competition.
As a prelude to midsummer, 450 scholars and students in ethnology, folklore, and related fields gathered from 13 to 16 June at the 35th Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Conference in Reykjavik. The University of Iceland celebrated the 100th anniversary of this triennial encounter relayed among universities in the Nordic region.This edition was sparked by a theme provided by the first syllable of the northernmost capital in the world, "RE". The hosts invited participants to present topics "integral to the ethnographic/folkloristic touch" through re-verbs and re-nouns. This resulted in a myriad of expressions and gave chance to discuss current research that revives the past through tales, crafts, and folk songs; makes us rethink the once familiar everyday life in this strange present; and seeks our reaction to future uncertainties. To suggest a common thread to all possible (re)configurations, Aleida Assmann has given much attention to this prefix in conjunction with cultural memory (e.g. 2008, 2020). For her, "re" is a performative agent that brings the past into the present by an act of remembrance, affecting greatly what survives into the future. Memory works through selective mechanisms that inevitably induce its opposite: forgetting. We can use this to remember that through our interpretations, certain subjectivities and perspectives are represented, reconfigured or renewed, while we should be mindful and seek those that remain silent.Reflecting the broad internationalisation of this conference, the authors of this report are immigrants in Nordic culture, ethnology, and folklore. Even if our projects are tied to these disciplines, and we are based in this region, our (research) identities lay elsewhere. Subsequently, this report does not attempt to be representative. Our "picks" and "reads" were inspired by the keynotes and the panels we visited, which we sorted in the temporalities that converge in Assmann's mechanisms of memory, and in the phenomena we study: the past, the present, and the future.The multinational collaborative work, Grimm Ripples: The Immediate Legacy of the Grimms' Deutsche Sagen in Northern Europe (2022), was the starting point of folklorist Terry Gunnell's keynote lecture. In it, he sketched the extensive history of the northward "cultural tsunami" of Deutsche Sagen [German Leg-
In the spring of 2020 young people were living in an exceptional period of isolation, messiness and emotional turmoil. The pandemic situation in Finland serves as the background of this study, which focuses on participation and the voice of adolescents in times of crisis. My inquiry is based on 75 diaries collected by diverse museums and archives and originally created by 11- to 18-year-olds during remote schooling, and my aim is to ascertain how they were invited in and responded to making the stuff of history. Combining oral history and media ethnographic methods, I provide an analysis of the diaries focusing on the emotional resilience attached to hobbies, the echo that the narrators’ information habits generate, and the media ecologies that resulted from the crafting and writing of diaries. My main argument is that although the diaries capture the narrators’ reactions to the crisis, the strong presence of their ordinary lives exposes shared generational traits that are worth preserving beyond this strange time. The students were writing in and about the immediate environment in which they lived their lives, which resulted in an uncommon and rich form of oral history that raised new questions about young people’s experiences during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Around 900 delegates of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) chose the mecca of European pilgrimage to celebrate this year's biennial congress. The tracks that pilgrims leave in their journey were chosen as a metaphor, to reflect on the marks that humans leave behind, which are observed and analysed by our research community. The congress title 'Track Changes' refers to transformations that both the word and our discipline are facing, and to how we as its practitioners are adapting. The authors of this report each followed the thematic area that most resonated with our research: digital and creative ethnography. In this report, we offer a summary of the keynotes and a personal reflection on these thematic areas. Cidade da Cultura, located on top of Gaiás hill, was the location chosen to welcome all participants. This modern artificial hilltop created by Peter Eisenman is a controversial place as it required the mining of part of the hill's base and because its completion was interrupted by the economic crisis in 2008. In this milieu, Susana Narotzky delivered the first keynote, The politics of evidence in an uncertain world: Experience, knowledge, social facts and factual truth. The experiences of struggle and precarity of communities that, as Gaiás hill, still suffer the aftermath of the financial crisis in Spain, are the evidence examined by Narotzky. These experiences counter the power of political evidence, dominated by numbers, trends and traces of fake optimism. After a half-day of sessions, we listened to the second keynote by Tim Ingold, titled Strike-through and wipe-out: Tactics for overwriting the past. Filling the chalkboard behind him with sketches, Ingold showed us that any human-made gesture of elimination never succeeds in removing what was there before, as it happens when rock naturally sediments in layers forming the surface of the Earth. Before such destructive tactics, it is our task to explore that trace of life, that wiggling text or ground that survives underneath. Someone in the audience asked Tim Ingold to talk about digital overwriting and removal, but he admitted that he had not adjusted enough to using a computer to do it. However, the digital world was addressed on the last day by Coppélie Cocq in her keynote Digital footprints and narrative traceability / Nar
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