Diversity in Human Diversity symposium took place in November
The second Diversity in Human Diversity symposium was arranged as hybrid, and the theme of the day was Space and Place.
The morning session featured, as per tradition, one of the docents in digital language studies, Dr. Lotta Lehti. Her talk explored digital humanities and current discourses, including topics such as social media bots. Dr. Lehti was joined by Dr. Olli Kuparinen, whose presentation was particularly engaging for those working with Finnish language and dialects.
The second session followed the customary format of a panel discussion. An impromptu addition to the panel was Dr. Outi Vesakoski, who presented on the ADDA database. Dr. Aleksi Sahala from the University of Helsinki quickly found common ground with professor Filip Ginter, demonstrating that the “language” of machine learning in natural language processing transcends time periods.
The afternoon keynote speaker professor Kalle Korhonen further delved into historical linguistics, this time from the perspective of sources and traditional methods focusing on the space and place theme of the seminar. His opening joke, “Sicily is not an island,” was met with laughter by attendees familiar with the Finnish school Latin textbooks traditional first sentence Sicilia insula est. He went on to highlight how the rich linguistic contacts in Sicily reveal that, while technically an island, it has never been isolated.
Thank you everyone for joining!
