I am a member of Computational History (COMHIS) research group at the University of Helsinki—and one of CASCADE’s early researchers. Last week, COMHIS successfully organised the Digital Humanity Hackathon 2025 (DHH 25) in Helsinki. Over 10 intense days, 36 participants from across disciplines came together to explore how digital methods can shed new light on humanities questions. As this milestone year marked a decade of DHH, the energy and enthusiasm were especially high.
Four Interdisciplinary Tracks
This year’s hackathon featured four thematic tracks, each tackling a different facet of digital humanities:
- ParliaNets: Parliaments beyond Borders
Investigating how debates in one country draw on foreign influences, participants mapped networks of parliamentary speeches and foreign-policy discussions. - Oral History: Digital Presence in Physical Absence
Teams worked with Holocaust survivor testimonies, exploring how digital tools can preserve and analyze stories when the speakers themselves are no longer present. - Rare Earth: Rare Earth & Web Discourses
Focusing on parallel mining approaches, this track combined environmental history with online discourse analysis to trace how “rare earth” minerals enter public conversation. - Early Modern: Economic Bubbles, Consumerism, and the Colonies
This group uses Burney and Nichols newspaper collections to track consumer trends and indicators of economic change in emerging colonial markets.
I had the honour of serving as Team Leader for the Early Modern track—my first time in this role. I was responsible for distributing our datasets and providing all the technical support our team needed.
Ten Intense Days
Over the course of ten days, participants had to:
- Define their research question
- Process and clean the data
- Apply digital-humanities methods
- Analyze the results
- Design and produce a poster
- Deliver a final presentation
It was a fantastic opportunity to experience the full research-and-development workflow of a digital-humanities project, and to collaborate with peers from so many different backgrounds.
Lessons in Leadership
I also learned a great deal about effective leadership, for example subdividing our team into focused sub-groups to drive parallel progress, ensuring regular check-ins and cross-group collaboration so every member could contribute meaningfully. With the help of co-leaders Ville (PhD in COMHIS) and Jonas (PhD in COMHIS)—especially Ville, whose extensive DHH experience showed me how to guide brainstorming sessions when participants were stuck, and when to rein in overly broad discussions—we balanced creativity with clear, achievable goals throughout the hackathon.
Final Showcase & Celebrations
On May 24th, we held our final poster session and presentations—and it was a great success! We saw four outstanding posters addressing each of the themes.
Of course, it wasn’t all work. We snuck in a few fun competitions, too:
- Coffee-drinking contest (who was the most average coffee drinker?)
- Karaoke contest (which team could sing the most songs?)
By the end of DHH25, I believe we’d all become more than just collaborators—we’d become friends. Who knows? Maybe our paths will cross again on another project.
Feeling inspired? We hope to see you at DHH26!
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Ke Shu is a CASCADE ESR in Digital Humanities at University of Helsinki. Her research interests lie at the intersection of computational methods and the humanities, with a particular focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP). Ke specialises in computational history, exploring 18th-century English political thought and the history of ideas.
CASCADE is a collaboration between University College Cork, University of Sheffield, University of Helsinki, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Universität des Saarlandes. Funded by Horizon Europe under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks and the UKRO.