Research Projects and Teams

Research Projects

Artificial Intelligence Before Computers: The History of Romantic Computationalism (AICOM). Machine learning and neural networks have advanced rapidly in the twenty-first century, yet the dream of strong AI – a humanlike artificial consciousness – remains as fictional as in the Romantic era when Mary Shelley published her novel Frankenstein. Artificial Intelligence Before Computers (AICOM) investigates how ideas about thinking machines long predate modern hardware, tracing computationalist thought from early modern philosophers like Hobbes and Leibniz to the mechanical automata and fictional thinking beings of Romantic-era that reflected industrial anxieties and shaped early AI discourse. By examining philosophical writings, journalism and fiction from Germany, Britain and the United States, the project highlights how concepts of “computation” and “artificial intelligence” are historically constructed, revealing ruptures and forgotten pathways in technological development. Drawing on media archaeology and Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, AICOM shows how abandoned or imagined machine-intelligence projects – from mechanical automata to Babbage’s Analytical Engine – illuminate both their own time and the deeper origins of today’s hopes and fears about mechanised thought. The project is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. PI: Docent Asko Nivala. https://askonivala.github.io/projects/aicom/

Imagined Homelands: The Finnish-language Press in North America 1876–1923 and the Digital Study of Transnational Culture. New technologies have dramatically changed the way we study historical materials. The availability of newspapers and magazines in digital format has enabled us to ask novel questions, as we can examine those collections on a larger scale, beyond what is possible through close reading. The Imagined Homelands project seeks to take advantage of these opportunities and to develop methods for the study of transnational, Finnish culture in North America. Our basic idea is that the textual construction of immigrant newspapers provides clues to how they imagined both past and present homelands. The immigrant press took shape between cultures, publishing news from both Finland and North America, sometimes directly copying, but also reminiscing, reflecting, and imagining the conditions of the former homeland. During the project, around 350 000 pages of Finnish-language newspapers and journals from North America will be digitised and made available via the digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi service. PI: Hannu Salmi. Duration and funding: 2024–2027, Kone Foundation. https://sites.utu.fi/kuvitellutkotimaat/en/

LAWPOL Digital tools for the study of law and politics. Law it is a cultural product that expresses a society’s identity, history, and values. Legal and legislative documents, available in LAWPOL, are carriers of values, traditions and cultures. They constitute both physical artifacts and intangible attributes of cultural heritage, providing insights into societal beliefs and values across generations. Legal language itself is part of cultural heritage. The way laws are written, interpreted, and translated reflects linguistic traditions. Homepahe in Finnish: https://lawpol.fi/. Homepage in English: https://lawpol.fi/en/

Sustainable, Usable and Visible Digital Cultural Heritage: Twinning for Excellence (DIGHT-Net). DIGHT-Net is a collaborative research initiative focused on advancing digital cultural heritage studies at Tallinn University (TLU) through partnerships with the University of Bologna (UNIBO), the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the University of Turku (UTU). To mobilise and amplify digital cultural heritage research locally, nationally and internationally, ensure sustainability and maximise the impact, the joint research hub of Digital Cultural Heritage studies (DIGHT-Hub) will be co-established at the TLU’s School of Humanities. The project shall prototype a Twinned Digital Archive of Juri Lotman and Umberto Eco, digitize the archive materials of Lotman, and build a semiotic theory of digital cultural heritage, based on the work of Lotman, Eco and other scholars.
Consortium PI: Marek Tamm (Tallinn University). Finnish PI: Hannu Salmi. Duration and funding: 2024–2027, EU Horizon. https://dight-net.tlu.ee/

Research Centres and Teams

Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, 2018-2025. The Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies is a joint project between researchers from the Tampere University, University of Turku, and the University of Jyväskylä. Across these institutions, over 30 researchers from the humanities, social sciences and technical sciences are engaged in exploring topics related to the research themes of the centre. https://coe-gamecult.org/

Data Science Team operates at the Department of Computing, with a focus on computational analysis of complex natural and social systems (e.g. computational history and population research). The research will focus on methods of modern data analysis and machine learning as part of the team and in collaboration with the profiling area. Keywords: statistical data analysis, probabilistic programming, machine learning, scientific computing. Homepage: datascience.utu.fi

TurkuNLP (Natural Language Processing) is a multidisciplinary research group combining NLP and digital linguistics. We develop machine learning methods and tools to automatically process and understand text data and apply these to explore human interaction and communication in very large digital text datasets such as those automatically crawled from the internet and historical text collections. Homepage: https://turkunlp.org/