Centre for Digital Humanities
Linnaeus University has a strong foundation in Digital Humanities, integrating computational methods with humanities research. The Centre for Digital Humanities aims to unify expertise, enhance education, and strengthen research opportunities across Linnaeus University and beyond.
By consolidating domestic and global networks, such as Huminfra, DARIAH-EU and DHNB, the Centre aims to position Linnaeus University as a leader in advancing interdisciplinary digital research and addressing contemporary challenges in the humanities.
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Purpose and Aims
Digital Humanities developments at Linnaeus University started in 2015 and by 2024 have resulted in significant education, research, and infrastructural outcomes, both nationally and internationally. These include the establishment of the Digital Humanities field as a subject of study, the successful Digital Humanities Master’s program, leading Sweden into DARIAH (international infrastructure) via Huminfra (national infraction) as well as a number of European and national projects.
The purpose of the Centre for Digital Humanities is to:
- Formalize Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University, in line with national and international Digital Humanities centres;
- Enable the systematic presentation of Linnaeus University’s competence in Digital Humanities, both for Linnaeus University colleagues and for external stakeholders;
- Further consolidate and disseminate Digital Humanities education and training, both for students and researchers;
- Enhance research at Linnaeus University, nationally and internationally;
- Extend cross-sectoral collaborations by charting existing collaborations currently largely taking place at the individual level;
- Increasing outreach and publicity for local Digital Humanities-related initiatives through various Linnaeus University channels.
The Centre for Digital Humanities specifically aims to:
- Serve as a one-stop-shop for all Digital Humanities events, people, materials, tools and other resources at Linnaeus University.
- Formalize collaborations with external institutions.
- Enable joint project proposals across Linnaeus University, with external partners, to secure further project funding.
- Provide regular fora for cross-disciplinary meetings and events.
- Establish a communication platform.
Our long-term vision is to create a leading education, development and research regional centre that in novel ways combines already existing expertise from different Linnaeus University departments and faculties working in close collaboration and co-creation with people and different organizations (both public and private sector) from the surrounding society. Addressing future societal challenges would be possible by highly skilled professionals whose education has been markedly enhanced by practice-informed education and joint, cross-sector innovation.
Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University: A Historical Overview
Digital Humanities has been formally established at Linnaeus University since 2015 when the proposal for a one-year cross-faculty and a cross-sectoral project was submitted to an internal call for strategic funding. The application was submitted by Koraljka Golub and Marcelo Milrad, representing the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the Faculty of Technology, respectively.
In 2016 the project received funding (200,000 SEK) and created a network of colleagues at Linnaeus University, advisors from other universities, and representatives of external, non-academic organizations. The accompanying webpage showed that already in its early days, Linnaeus University’s Digital Humanities community comprised 41 colleagues from 4 faculties and 10 departments, as well as the university library.
Furthermore, external academic collaborations were established with 48 colleagues from around the world: Asia (China), Australia, Europe (Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, United Kingdom), North America (United States), and South America (Brazil, Ecuador). In addition, there were another 9 advisors from Australia, Croatia, Sweden and United Kingdom.
Lastly, non-academic external partners also made up 21 colleagues, primarily in Sweden, such as Kalmar municipality, Kalmar County Museum, Region Kronoberg, Biblioteksutveckling Blekinge Kronoberg (BiBK), Det Fria Ordets Hus, Kulturparken Småland, Växjö City Library, Växjö Kommun, Husseby Bruk. Despite these efforts, this did not prove a sustainable in the long-term: due to unavailable funding beyond 2016, the webpage was not systematically maintained, reducing the visibility of Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University as well as our partners.
Other Digital Humanities initiatives at Linnaeus University include the Data Intensive Digital Humanities, a research area within the Linnaeus University Centre for Data Intensive Sciences and Applications (DISA). Off the back of DISA, the Data Intensive Digital Humanities was positioned to support computationally heavy research in the humanities, arriving at admirable results (e.g., the Nordic Tweet Stream or Open Data Exploration in Virtual Reality).
International Collaboration
In 2016, Linnaeus University was the first Swedish university to join the European Research Infrastructure Consortium, Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU). DARIAH-EU is a pan-European infrastructure supporting digital research in the humanities and is made up of 22 national members and 19 collaborating partners.
Contemporaneously with the events above, the very first International Symposium on Digital Humanities ever to be held in Sweden was organized by Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University in 2016, the extended papers of which were later published under open access4.
Linnaeus University also became a core participant in other international Digital Humanities formations. Nordic-Baltic collaborations were established and sustained through the Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries (DHNB) association, with Koraljka Golub serving on its Board. So far, DHNB annual conferences have been held almost every year since its inception: Oslo (2016), Gothenburg (2017), Helsinki (2018), Copenhagen (2019), Riga (2020), Uppsala (2022), online (2023) and Reykjavik (2024). Notably, since 2017 Linnaeus University led annual workshops at DHNB on DH in higher education. For more information, see section titled “Workshop Series ‘Higher Education Programs in Digital Humanities’”.
Another notable collaboration is the BAL-ADRIA Summer School on Digital Humanities, partnering Linnaeus University with Uppsala University with the University of Zadar (see Education).
Several years later we sent in an application to Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council) to admit Sweden as a full national member within DARIAH-EU. Following guidance from Vetenskapsrådet, this application was merged with an application from Lund University’s Humanities Lab’s (HumLab), resulting in the Swedish Huminfra infrastructure (see below).
Finally on 1 July 2024, led by the efforts of Linnaeus University, Sweden has joined DARIAH-EU through Huminfra as a full national member, with Koraljka Golub as the national coordinator (as decided by Vetenskapsrådet).
Domestic Collaboration
As mentioned above, Linnaeus University joined the Huminfra project led by Lund University’s Humlab. Huminfra is a Swedish national infrastructure supporting digital research in the Humanities through a portal to existing materials and research tools. Huminfra also develops educational resources on digital methods.
Linnaeus University has been active in both facets, developing Digital Humanities courses and sharing its local resources for wider visibility and access. The consortium behind Huminfra consists of 12 nodes across 11 universities and organizations – including the universities of Gothenburg and Uppsala as well as the National Library and National Archive – all coordinated by the aforementioned Humlab.
As mentioned, it was through Huminfra that Linnaeus University successfully led efforts to admit Sweden into DARIAH-EU as a national member, and is currently responsible for coordination the interchange between DARIAH'’s Europe-wide Digital Humanities infrastructure and Huminfra’s domestic Digital Humanities network.
Further examples of domestic collaborations are detailed in the sections below. Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University can be seen in the following section on Education, including the DH Master Programme, which has been another venue for cross-sector, cross-university and interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as the doctoral school, DASH, involving Linnaeus University, Gothenburg, Umeå and Uppsala.
Linnaeus University in DARIAH-EU
In 2016, Linnaeus University was the first Swedish institution to join the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU). DARIAH is the pan-European infrastructure for arts and humanities scholars, bringing together expertise, knowledge, methods, tools and technologies from across its 22 member countries and 15 additional partners (as of 2024).
The goal of DARIAH is to improve and support digitally-enabled research and teaching within the arts and humanities.
In 2018, LNU participated in two strategic events about the importance of DARIAH for Sweden: the Digital Humanities Day with Frank Fischer, co-director of DARIAH-EU and Associate Professor for Digital Humanities at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. See a five-minute interview with Frank Fischer on "Why DARIAH?" here: https://vimeo.com/305977797. And, on 21 Feburary 2018, "DARIAH-SWE? - Discussion around an initiative to start a national organization", meeting held at Gothenburg University, Sweden. In 2023, Linnaeus University alongside Uppsala University renewed its cooperative partnership with DARIAH.
In 2024/2025, Sweden is set to join DARIAH as a member country through the national infrastructure project, Huminfra, which includes Linnaeus University and Uppsala. With funding from the Swedish Research Council, Huminfra consists of 11 Swedish universities and organizations coming together to support and advance digital and experimental research in the humanities, including the development of a portal for finding and accessing resources from members such as datasets, tools, expertise and training material.
As DARIAH partners, Linnaeus University and Uppsala University share resources across DARIAH’s various platforms:
- Digital Humanities Course Registry: a platform that provides an overview of teaching activities (courses, degree programmes, etc.) in the field of digital humanities worldwide.
- #dariahTeach: a platform for open educational resources (OER) which offer asynchronous, online courses in the digital arts and humanities for both students and educators.
- DARIAH Campus: a platform for discovering and accessing learning resources on various topics in the digital arts and humanities.
- Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) Open Marketplace: maintained in part through DARIAH, the SSH Open Marketplace is a portal, aggregator and catalog for tools, services, training material, publications, datasets, and workflows.
Below are resources from Linnaeus University (LNU) or Uppsala, or development in collaboration with other institutions, which are currently featured across DARIAH’s platforms:
Programmes
- Digital Humanities, Master’s Programme (LNU) (DH Course Registry)
- Digital Humanities, Master’s Programme (Uppsala) (DH Course Registry)
- Swedish National Research School in Digital Humanities, PhD Programme LNU/Uppsala) (DH Course Registry)
Academic courses
- Programming for Digital Humanities (LNU) (DH Course Registry)
- Editing & Transcribing Premodern Texts (LNU/Lund University) (DH Course Registry)
- BALADRIA Summer School in Digital Humanities (LNU/Uppsala) (DH Course Registry)
Learning Resources
- Design, Development and Deployment of Augmented Reality Applications (LNU) (#dariahTeach)
- Introduction to Knowledge Organisation Systems for the Digital Humanities (LNU) (#dariahTeach; SSH Marketplace)
- Netnography (LNU) (#dariahTeach; SSH Marketplace)
- Photogrammetry Tutorial (LNU) (DARIAH Campus)
- Text Analysis: Linguistic Meets Data Science (LNU) (#dariahTeach)
- Data Analysis with Python (#dariahTeach)
- Digital Historical Research on European Historical Newspaper with NewsEye Platform (#dariahTeach)
- E-spectator Digital Tool for Analysis of Performing Arts (#dariahTeach; SSH Marketplace)
- Chroma Key Tutorial (LNU) (DARIAH Campus)
Tools/Datasets
- Attention HTR Model - handwritten word recognition (Uppsala) (Marketplace)
- BerryBERT - text classification for Finnish OCR texts (Uppsala) (SSH Marketplace)
- Epub text-extraction tool (Uppsala) (SSH Marketplace)
- Libralinked: Modelisation of scandinavian library data (Uppsala) (SSH Marketplace)
- The Lost Generation Corpus (LNU) (SSH Marketplace)
- Marginalia and machine learning (Pytorch) (Uppsala) (SSH Marketplace)
- Node Goat and Node Goat Server (Uppsala) (SSH Marketplace)
- Scripts for Optical Character Recognition in batches (Uppsala) (SSH Marketplace)
- Word rain: Semantically motivated word clouds (Uppsala) (SSH Marketplace)
Education in Digital Humanities
Within Digital Humanities, Linnaeus University offers the following:
- Course: Programming for Digital Humanities, online, in English, 50%
- Summer School in Digital Humanities, in collaboration with University of Zadar, Uppsala University.
- Master programme in Digital Humanities in the field of Digital Humanities, online, in English, 100%.
- Swedish National Doctoral School in Digital Humanities: Data, Culture, and Society – Critical Perspectives (DASH)
Education: A Historical Overview
Digital Humanities education and training at Linnaeus University also started in 2016, with planning for a Programming for Digital Humanities course from the Faculty of Technology, which first ran in 2017 and every academic year since. In 2017, the Digital Humanities Seminar Series was established but stopped during the pandemic, later taken-up as part of the DH master’s series of invited lectures. Then, in 2019, in cooperation with the Uppsala University and the University of Zadar, Croatia, the first BAL-ADRIA (Baltic-Adriatic) Summer School in Digital Humanities was held and (despite a pause during the pandemic) continues to be held every summer. In fact, 2024 BAL-ADRIA began hosting PhD students from DASH, the Swedish PhD School in Digital Humanities, with instructors from the University of Gothenburg.
With respect to higher education, 2019 saw digital humanities becoming a formal subject of study at Linnaeus University, organizationally placed together with Library and Information Science at the Department of Cultural Sciences. In parallel with this development, the Digital Humanities Master program (60/120 credits) was launched and enrolled first students in 2020. The Digital Humanities Master is coordinated by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and co-coordinated by the Faculty of Technology, and initially received external funding through the Avans programme from Stiftelsen för kunskaps- och kompetensutveckling (KKS) to develop it in collaboration with external partners such as:
- Private companies: ArkivDigital, Disir, Grow, Nordic Entertainment Group, OnSpotStory.
- Public sector actors: Swedish National Heritage Board, Kalmar County Museum, ASK (Använda och Sprida Kultur), RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Swedish National Data Service.
At the doctoral level, Swedish National Doctoral School in Digital Humanities: Data, Culture, and Society – Critical Perspectives (DASH) was established in 2023 with four years of funding from VR. Digital Humanities at LLinnaeus University led this initiative, with the DASH being currently run by Uppsala University with Gothenburg, Linnaeus and Umeå universities acting as collaborators. Linnaeus University contributes with two courses and the BAL-ADRIA summer school.
Further on the topic of doctoral Digital Humanities studies, in June this year, the Department of Cultural Sciences was granted PhD rights in Digital Humanities (in conjunction with the Library and Information Science PhD rights). Link to the PhD program
Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University has also been developing open education. Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH) was an initiative led by Linnaeus University in collaboration with six European universities that saw the development and deployment of seven open educational resources (OERs) through an Erasmus+ funded project 2020-20229. These OERs are currently hosted on the international, open #dariahTeach platform.
In response to local interest and needs, various initiatives were also undertaken to advance Digital Humanities competencies in-house. The Digital Humanities Strategy at FKH resulted in a series of training events in digital research methods for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities researchers and in collaboration with Linnaeus University Language Processing Lab (LiLa Lab), coordinated by Jonas Svensson and conducted with Daniel Ihrmark. Training sessions include topics such as:
- Automated transcription
- Web scraping and online data collection
- Generating teaching materials using LLMs
- Text and image classification
- LLM-supported programming for beginners
- Low-code tools for humanists
Events have been also coordinated with Huminfra events open to all Huminfra participants across Sweden. In addition to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, the Faculty of Technology and DISA Centre of Excellence contribute their computer science expertise to Huminfra. Interest in Digital Humanities has also been expressed by coordinators of Bachelor level courses, leading Digital Humanities instructors to develop workshops on computational literary analysis in courses such as Comparative Literature (2li10e).
Research projects
Below are some examples of Digital Humanities projects conducted at Linnaeus University to illustrate the diverse breadth of expertise and experience. They include the development of research infrastructures, platforms and tools alongside the advancement of scholarship.
Mapping Lived Religion
Project leader: Sara Ellis Nilsson
Funder: The Swedish Research Council
"Mapping Lived Religion" builds a comprehensive online database providing open-access across cultural heritage collections, both textual and material, and digitized material in collaboration with the National Historical Museums and Swedish National Heritage Board.
The project creates interactive, digital maps that allow users to sort churches, parishes and cult-sites chronologically, geographically and by saint. These resources will enable new, in-depth investigations into the culture of medieval and early modern Scandinavia. The database and maps are the project’s major digital publication, important for future research. Mapping Saints is a research and educational resource containing a comprehensive, online database which provides open access to data related to the cults of saints in the medieval church province of Uppsala, which included most of modern Sweden and Finland. The database was created based on the project Mapping Lived Religion’s main research question: lived religion as expressed through the veneration of saints. This focus has influenced how the data is categorized and organized.
Nordic Spatial Humanities
Project leader: Alexandra Petrulevich, Uppsala University, with Sara Ellis Nilsson on the project team
"Nordic Spatial Humanities" aims to bring together humanities researchers and research engineers and others in related sectors (museums, archives, libraries) who are working on geocoded humanities data pertaining to the Nordic countries and beyond.
The objectives are to (1) generate dialogue and exchange between relevant academic and non-academic sectors on the subject of spatial data and data infrastructures in the Humanities, and (2) facilitate a collaborative initiative whereby common principles regarding ontologies and metadata will be mapped out by members of the network. Collaborative data infrastructure solutions based on Linked Open Data (LOD) and FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) will underpin and further advances in Humanities research that builds on geocoded data.
Huminfra
As mentioned above, Huminfra is a Swedish national infrastructure supporting digital and experimental research in the Humanities by providing users with a single-entry point for finding existing Swedish materials and research tools, as well as developing national method courses.
Led by Lund University, Linnaeus University is one of 12 collaborating nodes in the network, supporting the project by contributing resources and tools for the platform, as well as innovating the platform for improved access. Furthermore, Linnaeus University joins Huminfra in creating new national courses in e-scientific/digital methods, as well as heading the Swedish membership in the European Research Infrastructure Consortium, The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU).
Digital Methods Platform for Arts and Humanities (DiMPAH)
Project Ieader: Koraljka Golub
Funder: Erasmus+
DiMPAH was a collaborative project to aggregate, connect and make widely available novel Open Education Resources (OERs) on selected digital methods, apply these to interdisciplinary contexts and foster novel creative learning experiences by taking data from the past into future stories. Partnering with Linnaeus University was Aarhus University, University of Amsterdam, University of La Rochelle, University of Cyprus and University of Porto. The following OERs are now available as the result of the project:
- Data Analysis with Python
- Text Analysis - Linguistics Meets Data Science
- Netnography
- Digital Historical Research on European Historical Newspaper with NewsEye Platform
- E-spectator
- Design, Development and Deployment of Augmented Reality Applications
- Introduction to Knowledge Organization Systems.
The Lost Generation Corpus
The Lost Generation Corpus, at its core, is a project focused on setting up the resources for future research on the group of post-World War I artists and writers known as the Lost Generation.
The project collects, prepares, and saves the output of the authors in a computer-searchable text collection, a corpus, which allows materials to be sorted according to authorship, time of publication and text type. This dataset can then be explored with the myriads of tools available to us through corpus linguistics, allowing for insights into how the literary styles of the authors developed and changed throughout their careers.
Artificial Intelligence as a Risk and Opportunity for the Authenticity of Archives
The purpose of the project Artificial Intelligence as a Risk and Opportunity for the Authenticity of Archives is to conceptualise and guide the design of AI based methods which embody and address archival professional imperatives by using open and available datasets from the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) and the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet).
Global Archives Online
The Global Archives Online is a resource designed to identify and locate open resources for the study of colonial and global history.
Digital Innovations: Developing New Information Landscapes for the Mapping of Cultural Events Using Web and Mobile Technologies
Through this collaborative research project designs and implements new ways for the cultural sector to communicate and reach out to different audiences by taking advantage of current digital technologies, while also allowing data about cultural events to be collected to inform future developments in the creative culture sector.
Extending Design Thinking with Emerging Digital Technologies
ExtenDT² uses design-based research to support/provide evidence for pedagogical transformation via Design Thinking enhanced by Emerging Technologies. It employs already institutionalized, home-grown and open-access digital expressive media of advanced technical readiness for students to engage in Design Thinking projects.
ExtenDT² uniquely integrates with these expressive media Emerging Technologies i.e. ΑΙ-enhanced Authorable Learning Analytics, Augmented Reality, 3D printing/scanning and virtual robotics, to leverage digital implementation, monitoring and assessment of Design Thinking projects by teachers in schools.
Workshop Series "Higher Education Programs in Digital Humanities"
These workshops are part of the annual conference "Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference".
- Dagmar Brunow Professor
- +46 470-76 78 41
- dagmarbrunowlnuse
- Koraljka Golub Professor
- +46 470-70 89 09
- koraljkagolublnuse
- Fredrik Hanell Senior lecturer, head of department
- +46 470-70 85 89
- fredrikhanelllnuse
- Joacim Hansson Professor
- +46 470-70 89 71
- joacimhanssonlnuse
- Romain Herault Lecturer
- romainheraultlnuse
- Daniel Ocic Ihrmark Senior lecturer
- +46 470-76 72 03
- danielosundberglnuse
- Ahmad M. Kamal Senior lecturer
- ahmadkamallnuse
- Mikko Laitinen Professor
- mikkolaitinenlnuse
- Marcelo Milrad Professor
- +46 470-70 87 25
- +46 73-396 95 74
- marcelomilradlnuse
- Eleonor Marcussen Senior lecturer
- +46 470-70 83 21
- eleonormarcussenlnuse
- Sara Ellis Nilsson Associate Professor, Deputy Department head
- +46 470-70 84 79
- saraellisnilssonlnuse
- Pernilla Severson Associate Professor
- +46 480-49 70 58
- pernillaseversonlnuse
- Jonas Svensson Professor
- +46 470-70 86 98
- jonassvenssonlnuse
More about each participant's research in Digital Humanities
Dagmar Brunow, Professor, Institution för film och litteratur. Her work centres around the digitisation of film heritage, especially around questions of diversity and sustainability. She teaches two courses within the DH master: Film, archive, and digital culture (7,5 hp) as well as Film as a Research Tool (7,5 hp).
Koraljka Golub, Head of iInstitute, Linnaeus University’s iSchool; Professor in Library and Information Science, Department of Cultural Sciences. She has been leading Digital Humanities developments at Linnaeus University since 2015, active internationally in DHNB (Digital Humanities in Nordic and Baltic Countries) and driving Sweden into DARIAH-EU. She has initiated the Digital Humanities Master program and coordinated it for the first few years.
She is Linnaeus University’s representative in Huminfra, and a member of its operative management group. She was also PI on the European Dimpah project where she also developed an open educational resource on knowledge organization for Digital Humanities. Her Digital Humanities research has focused on the intersection of Digital Humanities and knowledge organization – by information professionals, by subject experts, by end users and automatic.
Fredrik Hanell, Senior Lecturer in Library and Information Science, Department of Cultural Sciences. He has done research and teaching on qualitative digital methods for social media research – most recently as part of the Dimpah project, where he contributed to an open education resource on netnography. Within the Digital Humanities, this captures his interest in reflexively combining qualitative and quantitative methods for digital research. Additionally, he has done some research on (digital) personal data and data literacy and supervised several Digital Humanities master theses.
Joacim Hansson, Professor of Library and Information Science, Department of Cultural Sciences. He is actively involved in the Digital Humanities Master Programme, focusing on the digital representation of cultural heritage documents and artefacts. Hansson's research interests include knowledge organization, document studies, and the institutional identity of libraries. He is a member of several international advisory boards for scholarly journals and plays a significant role in various digital humanities projects at Linnaeus University.
Romain Herault, Lecturer/Doctoral Student, Department of Computer Science and Media Technology, has conducted teaching and research on eXtended Reality (XR) related to DH and cultural heritage. He is active in Huminfra and provides national training opportunities to Swedish researchers on photogrammetry and motion capture. As part of the Dimpah project, he has contributed to an open education resource on digitization of cultural heritage. He currently teaches two courses in the Digital Humanities Master: 4ME503 (Course coordinator and main teacher), 4DH426 (Teacher, technical part).
Daniel Ocic Ihrmark, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Department of Cultural Sciences. His doctoral work dealt with the implementation of digital tools within language teaching. He has also performed research on the language development of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway using digital methods in the Lost Generation Corpus project. While Daniel’s research has mainly been focused on text, he has also been involved in projects with broader scopes, such as the analysis of materials related to online interactions in the Swedish far-right and the automated organization of written materials in different contexts.
Daniel is also active within the Educational Linguistics environment at Linnaeus University, which explores the role and use of language in educational contexts through transdisciplinary efforts. He is mainly involved in teaching connected to the Linnaeus University Digital Humanities Masters program, while also teaching on courses offered by the Language Department with a focus on digital perspectives on languages and linguistic analysis, as well as serving as an instructor in the BAL-ADRIA Summer School on Digital Humanities. Furthermore, Daniel contributes to workshops hosted by LiLa Lab in collaboration with the digital development team at the Faculty of Arts & Humanities.
Ahmad Kamal, Senior Lecturer in Library and Information Sciences, Department of Cultural Sciences. Ahmad is currently the programme director for the Digital Humanities Studies master. He is active in Digital Humanities in Nordic and Baltic Countries, where he serves as co-lead for the Working Group on Higher Education, Huminfra (coordinator of the Controlled Vocabulary Working Group), and coordinates the BAL-ADRIA Summer School on Digital Humanities.
Mikko Laitinen, Professor of English linguistics (SPR), interested in the use of large-scale social media data in SSH research as well as on data-intensive methods. Laitinen has a robust background in linguistics and digital humanities. He has been instrumental in leading numerous high-profile research projects and has a significant publication record, including 77 peer-reviewed articles and 240 conference presentations. Laitinen is also the Head of Data Intensive Digital Humanities at the Center of Data Intensive Sciences and Applications (DISA-DH).
Marcelo Milrad is a Full Professor of Media Technology at Linnaeus University in Sweden. His research spans across diverse fields including Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL), advanced human-computer interaction, innovative applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, and mobile technologies within Education & Health Care domains. With extensive experience in cross-disciplinary research and educational collaboration, Professor Milrad is at the forefront of leveraging information technologies to enhance teaching and learning experiences. Since March 2020, he serves as the main scientific coordinator of Linnaeus University's cross-disciplinary knowledge environment, Digital Transformations13, fostering collaboration across various fields.
Additionally, Dr. Milrad is actively engaged in an initiative at Linnaeus University alongside colleagues from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, known as Digital Humanities14, furthering interdisciplinary approaches to research and education. Professor Milrad's research is characterized by the close collaboration with industrial partners and the public sector, facilitating the development and implementation of cutting-edge technologies in real-world settings. Currently, he is the principal investigator for the research project Extending Design Thinking with Digital Technologies15, supported by the EU Commission (2022-2025, €3.2 million), aimed at integrating digital tools and emerging technologies to enhance design thinking processes.
With over 250 publications in international journals, refereed conferences, books, and technical reports, Dr. Milrad's work has made significant contributions to the fields of media technology and education. He has also delivered presentations and lectures on his research in more than 45 countries worldwide, furthering global discourse on the intersection of technology and education
Eleonor Marcussen, Senior Lecturer in History, Department of Cultural Sciences. She teaches the module and workshop “Digitizing Archives” on the course Digital History (4HI505, elective, DH master programme); Participated in the Digital Humanities Summer School in Oxford 2019; Previous experience in digitizing collections, surveying ‘old’ digital historical sources and building online research tools at League of Nations Archives at UNOG (Geneva).
Sara Ellis Nilsson, Docent in History and Senior Lecturer, Department of Cultural Sciences. Her current research focuses on using digital tools to study lived religion in particular the cults of saints in medieval Finland and Sweden. That is utilizing maps and relational databases to structure and analyze data in order to achieve new insights into historical processes with a foundation in social and cultural history. In order to be able to ensure long-term sustainability for the Mapping Saints resource/portal and to access the relevant developer expertise required, she has been collaborating with the Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in the Digital Humanities (GRIDH).
In addition to this project, she has also been investigating the use of digital tools in historical reenactment (in progress) and is interested in how the past/history is communicated/interpreted using digital tools and methods. Finally, she has also been involved in pilot research into linked (open) data and spatial data as connected to/used the humanities, in terms of infrastructural applications and requirements (Nordic Spatial Humanities).
Her externally funded projects are Mapping Lived Religion: Medieval Cults of Saints in Sweden and Finland (PI Sara Ellis Nilsson) and Nordic Spatial Humanities: Linking, Building, and Sustaining Humanities Digital Spatial Infrastructures for Research in the Nordic Countries (PI Alexandra Petrulevich, UU). Her DH teaching includes theses supervision for the Master Program in Digital Humanities (both 1-year and 2-year), and lecturing on Digital History for the Intro to Digital Humanities course. She is the coordinator and one of the lecturers for the master-level course, Digital History (4HI505).
Pernilla Jonsson Severson, Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies, Department of Media and Journalism. Her research, teaching and projects include digital methods and research ethics focusing the interplay of qualitative and more computational approaches to knowledge creation and storage. Research-wise this is applied in studies of media and journalism and gender: for example, on women journalism archives, new genres like webisodes and how to make sense of big and small data. In teaching, Pernilla has a specialty in social network analysis and within this field have supervised several varied digital humanities master theses. Within Huminfra, she is conducting teaching and learning workshops on social network analysis, based from research questions, not tools.
Jonas Svensson, Professor in Religion, Department of Cultural Sciences. He has conducted DH-related research in the form of computer-assisted text analysis and methods for distant reading with the aim of facilitating material sampling. Recently, he has mainly focused on Generative AI, both as a tool in the research process and as a subject of study, particularly in terms of text and image production (training, alignment, and bias). His teaching involved occasional contributions in the undergraduate program in Religious Studies, the doctoral program in Global Humanities, as well as workshops in text analysis, semantic network analysis, and LLM-enhanced topic modeling for colleagues.