Mila Oiva

False information on history, spreading widely in the internet, is a global phenomenon, which can potentially be used for forming the basis for distorted worldviews and strengthen social and political juxtapositions. Seeking to understand the phenomenon of pseudohistorical medievalism in the Russian language internet, this essay explores the position and contexts of pseudohistorical web pages in the medievalist discussions. The study analyses a selected sample of webpages within a hyperlink network to assess their potential influence and worldview of Russian language medievalist pseudohistory. The analysis reveals that the hyperlinked position of the webpages in the medievalist internet discussion is marginal and fragmented into separated knowledge communities. Despite their radical approaches to history, they share common features with the contemporary cultural and political discussions and historical schemas explaining the history and identity.

The chapter introduces the main themes of “Digital Histories”. It shortly discusses the histories of digital history and the various research projects that resulted in this volume, as well as the main contributions of the individual chapters. Focusing on the most recent periods of development of digital and computational history, the introduction explains how this book contributes to advancing the larger field of history in two primary ways: firstly through conceptual explorations of the central issues characterizing the past, present and future of digital history research, and secondly by providing new empirical historical knowledge coming out of research using digital methods. The chapter surveys a number of key challenges and criticisms facing contemporary and future historians, including the digitisation of sources, metadata creation for digital source materials, digital source and resource criticism, and the various salient questions involved in organising digital history resea...

Topic modeling is a highly useful method that can provide new ways to understand the past. In order to reach the full potential of the method, the researcher needs to understand the context, the specifics of the data, and how the algorithm works and know the research literature. This chapter demonstrates how topic modeling can be applied in the studies of Russian and East European history. It illustrates the choices a researcher will face and the needed steps for preparing a data set for topic modeling, and shows how the interpretation of topic modeling results works in practice. The chapter also addresses the question of the scattered nature of digitized collections of Russian history sources, and the associated challenges and opportunities in this context.

Historical scholarship is currently undergoing a digital turn. All historians have experienced this change in one way or another, by writing on word processors, applying quantitative methods on digitalized source materials, or using internet resources and digital tools. Digital Histories showcases this emerging wave of digital history research. It presents work by historians who – on their own or through collaborations with e.g. information technology specialists – have uncovered new, empirical historical knowledge through digital and computational methods. The topics of the volume range from the medieval period to the present day, including various parts of Europe. The chapters apply an exemplary array of methods, such as digital metadata analysis, machine learning, network analysis, topic modelling, named entity recognition, collocation analysis, critical search, and text and data mining. The volume argues that digital history is entering a mature phase, digital history ‘in action...

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 th...

This article examines digital humanities (DH) centers as focal points of the interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge. It is based on the assumption that the manner in which the knowledgetransfer activities of DH communities are facilitated affects the knowledge they produce. Following an analysis of eight semi-structured interviews of directors, researchers, and administrators, the article considers how DH professionals describe the facilitation of the interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge in DH centers. It demonstrates that the transfer of knowledge in DH centers is based on overlapping layers of organic networks and stable organizational structures that support various kinds of knowledge-sharing practices. The transfer of knowledge in DH centers combines the exchange of ideas in the same physical space with online communication at various levels, ranging from outside academia to the internal communication of a research group. Further, the factors that enable information flow als...

This volume is the first book-length account of Yves Montand’s controversial tour of the Soviet Union at the turn of the years 1956/57. It traces the mixed messages of this internationally visible act of cultural diplomacy in the middle of the turbulent Cold War. It also provides an account of the celebrated French singer-actor’s controversial career, his dedication to music and to peace activism, as well as his widespread fandom in the USSR. The book describes the political background for the events of the year 1956, including the changing Soviet atmosphere after Stalin’s death, portrays the rising transnational stardom of Montand in the 1940s and 1950s, and explores the controversies aroused by his plan to visit Moscow after the Hungarian Uprising. The book pays particular attention to Montand’s reception in the USSR and his concert performances, drawing on unique archival material and oral history interviews, and analyses the documentary Yves Montand Sings (1957) released immediately after his visit.

Although the concept of digital comes with an assumption of placelessness and detachment from physical space and geographical location, these matters still play a significant role in the way the digital humanities research is practiced today, and also in the future. The location, the surroundings and infrastructure open the questions of accessibility and equality: space shapes the opportunities for doing digital humanities research, both enables and hinders collaboration, and both unifies and divides scholars. The purpose of this special issue is to examine the different aspects of situated research practices of the digital humanities covering two perspectives: physical and virtual. The physical places of research refer to the various digital humanities sites (laboratories, centers, departments) all over the world and more widely to the surroundings a location in a particular city, country, cultural sphere or continent affecting research practices. As virtual environments of digital...

Leonardo (1968-present), published by MIT Press, is the leading international peer-reviewed publication on the relationship between art, science and technology, making it an ideal dataset to analyze the emergence of such complex collaborations over time. To identify and analyze both the visible and latent interaction patterns, the research employs different granularities of data (article texts, images, publication dates, authors, their places of affiliation and disciplines) as part of a multimodal approach. Using a convolutional neural network, we examined the features of the images to analyze the modes of representing (and actually doing) art, science or engineering. We paired these features with information extracted using text mining to examine the relationships between the visual and the textual over time.

The topic of the interview data are the personal memories and family stories about the tour of French-Italian singer-actor Yves Montand in the Soviet Union in 1956-57. It was collected in September-November 2019. The idea of the interviews was to collect information on how Yves Montand’s tour in the Soviet Union was remembered in Russia in autumn 2019, either by people who had experienced the visit in a way or another by themselves, or based on stories the respondents had heard from their family members, relatives and friends concerning Yves Montand.

Topic modeling is a computational text analysis method that summarizes the studied text and shows what kinds of topics it consists of. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how the method can be applied in studies of Russian history. Topic modeling is often used in analysis of massive datasets, but the chapter exemplifies that it is a useful addition to an analysis of smaller data sets as well. Taking examples from real research projects, the chapter walks through the basic principles of applying the method and discusses how to interpret the results of a topic model. Finally, the chapter gives a general overview of the digital sources available for studies on Russian history.

Although the concept of digital comes with an assumption of placelessness and detachment from physical space and geographical location, these matters still play a significant role in the way the digital humanities research is practiced today, and also in the future. The location, the surroundings and infrastructure open the questions of accessibility and equality: space shapes the opportunities for doing digital humanities research, both enables and hinders collaboration, and both unifies and divides scholars. The purpose of this special issue is to examine the different aspects of situated research practices of the digital humanities covering two perspectives: physical and virtual. The physical places of research refer to the various digital humanities sites (laboratories, centers, departments) all over the world and more widely to the surroundings a location in a particular city, country, cultural sphere or continent affecting research practices. As virtual environments of digital humanities scholarship, we define the digital internet-based platforms, services, and tools that enable research and scholarly collaboration. The aspects that determine digital humanities research in both physical and virtual places are infrastructure (material and non-material), social interaction (communication and collaboration), and context (social, cultural, and political situatedness). The aspects influence each other and changes in one of them can affect the others. They have also impact on what is studied, the ways research can be done, and, in the end the results of our knowledge, what kind of knowledge digital humanities research can provide. Digital Humanities Places and Spaces Although working in the same university and being interested in similar issues, we, the editors of this special issue, had never met until recently. As it often goes, sitting in different buildings belonging to different departments at the Otaniemi campus of the Aalto University, we were separated by the physical space and organizational structures of the university. Only the lucky coincidence that one of us had a short presentation at the "Aalto HELDIG DH pizza" event, and the other came to listen to that talk took us to the same room to talk to each other. Meeting on the same physical premises enabled us to see how close our interests and thoughts were, not only regarding pizza, but also in scholarly terms. Our story is not unique. Exploring the digital humanities (DH) matters, one cannot avoid noticing how the establishment of various DH places and their organizational changes influences how, where, and with whom we do DH research. Place plays a role in all academic disciplines, affecting the way we construct knowledge. In the DH field, which comes with a promise of utilization of "nonmaterial" and ubiquitous digital resources, there is a threat that we will forget how the place is also entangled in the digital. DH scholars work together in a physical place-a center and a laboratory-in which an infrastructure, facilities, and equipment determine the knowledge creation practices. DH researchers also collaborate in virtual space-online platforms and virtual research environments-in which an infrastructure, connection, and operation affect the work and research communication. The algorithms and designs of digital analysis and collaboration tools direct the way we work and what kinds of practices are not doable. Further, DH scholars also practice and collaborate in temporary places like hackathons and summer schools established around particular topics and people. Temporariness is one aspect that forms knowledge creation practices. In addition, the prerequisites for doing DH research vary greatly based on the wider social and cultural surroundings. Examination of the research practices and structures in their cultural contexts and the temporal dimensions guiding DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Lab and Slack. Situated Research...

This article examines digital humanities (DH) centers as focal points of the interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge. It is based on the assumption that the manner in which the knowledge-transfer activities of DH communities are facilitated affects the knowledge they produce. Following an analysis of eight semi-structured interviews of directors, researchers, and administrators, the article considers how DH professionals describe the facilitation of the interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge in DH centers. It demonstrates that the transfer of knowledge in DH centers is based on overlapping layers of organic networks and stable organizational structures that support various kinds of knowledge-sharing practices. The transfer of knowledge in DH centers combines the exchange of ideas in the same physical space with online communication at various levels, ranging from outside academia to the internal communication of a research group. Further, the factors that enable information flow also have the capability to restrict potentially meaningful information from entering into the field. As a result, this article suggests that it is important to continue the discussion on the boundaries for the transfer of knowledge in DH.

The dataset contains interviews focusing on facilitating research at digital humanities (DH) centers in Finland, Great-Britain and the United States. The aim of the interviews was to learn how the DH professionals describe the best practices identified in their centers and laboratories. The dataset is available for research and teaching purposes, and contains eight interviews (six in English and two in Finnish language). The interviews were made part of the Kone Foundation funded research project "From Roadmap to Roadshow: A collective demonstration and information project to strengthen Finnish digital history".

The Tämä aineisto sisältää tietoa tutkimustyön fasilitoinnista digitaalisen ihmistieteen keskuksissa Suomessa, Iso-Britanniassa ja Yhdysvalloissa. Tutkimuksessa pyrittiin löytämään hyviä käytäntöjä jaettavaksi muihin organisaatioihin, joissa tehdään humanistista tutkimusta digitaalisia menetelmiä hyödyntäen. Aineisto sisältää kahdeksan asiantuntijahaastattelua, joista kuusi on toteutettu englanniksi ja kaksi suomeksi. Haastattelut suoritettiin osana Koneen säätiön rahoittamaa hanketta "From Roadmap to Roadshow: A collective demonstration and information project to strengthen Finnish digital history".

This chapter studies Polish and Finnish traders' efforts to access the Soviet market. By analysing socialist Poland's clothing industry and capitalist Finland's shipbuilding industry access to the Soviet market, the study sheds light onto foreign trade practices of smaller states that sought to increase their room to manoeuvre in an asymmetric trade political situation. Agency of the smaller powers is analysed in three phases of commerce: market analysis, marketing, and political lobbying. The article focuses on individuals (entrepreneurs) and intermediate-level actors (Finland, Poland); private businesses (Finland) and state-owned foreign trade organisations (Poland). The chapter reveals that a sale onto the Soviet market took place within a set of political, economic, structural, social and cultural margins for manoeuvring. The rigidities as well as the loopholes of the planned economy formed the structures in which the actors operated. The article studies whether the two countries used similar strategies to sell their products to the Soviet buyers. It suggests that their relative leverage was related to their perceived westernness compared to the USSR and agility to respond to Soviet demand. With successful business deals both actors gained, besides economic benefit, also sovereignty vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

The article, titled in Finnish "the Collision of Perspectives. Year 1968 in Eastern Europe", writes about the events in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the reactions of the Soviet people to them in 1968. The East European societies had developed rapidly after World War II, and the varying perspectives on how the development should continue led to the collisions between the "hard"- and "soft-liners".

This doctoral dissertation examines Polish ready-made clothing exporters' perception of their leverage on the Soviet market, and its change in 1949-1961. It studies the phenomenon through the gradually-developing advertising and marketing practices of the Polish intermediate level organizations, the Central Board of the Clothing Industries (CZPO, Centralny Zarząd Przemysłu Odzieżowego), later reformed to the Polish Association of Clothing Industries (ZPO, Zjednoczenie Przemysłu Odzieżowego), and Foreign Trade Company CETEBE, which implemented the production and export plans made in the high level organizations of the Polish central committee and the ministries. Utilizing the meeting minutes, reports, and internal correspondence of the Polish clothing exporters together with photographs and journal articles as the primary sources, the study sheds light onto the gradually changing practices within the socialist consumer goods foreign trade. The focus of transnational practices of intermediate level organizations allows the study to reveal a more nuanced picture of communication within the socialist bloc, and its changes in the 1950s. The increase of clothing mass-production in Europe, and development of consumer cultures, de-Stalinization, and economic reformism in the socialist bloc were processes that changed the dynamics of intra-bloc consumer goods foreign trade and increased the opportunities of the Polish clothing exporters on the Soviet market. The key research finding of the thesis is that the perception of the Polish clothing exporters on the Soviet market changed from being a highly controlling 'non-market' in the early 1950s to a competitive market by 1961, which both enabled and demanded marketing if one wanted to secure one's position. Another result of the study is the development of a new concept, action space, which allows a more structured study of the scope of possible activities, defined by restrictions and opportunities, and negotiated by the actor in focus. Furthermore, the study reveals that the internal cultural dynamics of the socialist bloc contained 'reversed' cultural flows, where the political centre of Moscow received new influences from the officially more remote locations, like Poland. These results lead to broader conclusions indicating that the overall significance of intermediate level organizations in the socialist bloc began to increase since the mid-1950s, which influenced both the national and intra-bloc dynamics.

The article analyses the emerging advertising and marketing practices of the Polish ready-made clothing exporters, which they adopted in the early 1960s in order to respond to the emerging competition in the consumer good import market of the Soviet Union.

The scale of newspaper digitization and emergence of computational research methods has opened new opportunities for scholarship on the history of the press-as well as a new set of problems. Those problems compound for research that spans national as well as linguistic contexts. This article offers a novel methodological approach for confronting these challenges by synthesizing computational with conventional methods and working across a collaborative multilingual team. We present a case study studying the transnational and multilingual news event of Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth's journey to the United States in 1851-52. Our approach helps to demonstrate some of the characteristic patterns and complexities in transatlantic news circulation, including the pathways, reach, temporality, vagaries, and silences of this system. These patterns, in turn, offer some insights into how we understand the significance of this era for histories of the press.

False information on history, spreading widely in the internet, is a global phenomenon, which can potentially be used for forming the basis for distorted worldviews and strengthen social and political juxtapositions. Seeking to understand the phenomenon of pseudohistorical medievalism in the Russian language internet, this essay explores the position and contexts of pseudohistorical web pages in the medievalist discussions. The study analyses a selected sample of webpages within a hyperlink network to assess their potential influence and worldview of Russian language medievalist pseudohistory. The analysis reveals that the hyperlinked position of the webpages in the medievalist internet discussion is marginal and fragmented into separated knowledge communities. Despite their radical approaches to history, they share common features with the contemporary cultural and political discussions and historical schemas explaining the history and identity.