Category: Blog Posts 2025

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:

1. ParliaNets: Parliaments beyond Borders
   Investigating how debates in one country draw on foreign influences, participants mapped networks of parliamentary speeches and foreign-policy discussions.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.

Continue reading “CASCADE ESR Ke Shu reflects on her experience at DHH 25”

When everyone at high school was busy choosing majors for their university applications, I was daydreaming about becoming a lexicographer. I loved the idea of working with dictionaries, especially English dictionaries. As the lingua franca and the language of the academic world, it was English that opened so many doors for me, liberated me, and above all, quenched my thirst for knowledge. But mastering a tool is completely different from having it as the subject of your research. I then had grown so fond of the language that I wished to study it. But as a non-native speaker, how could I make it happen? That is not to mention that linguistics and lexicography were not taught as majors at the best university in my region. Time went by, and I forgot about the little crazy dream I had.

I have a bachelor’s degree in English Studies from Can Tho University in Vietnam, a master’s degree in Linguistics from Purdue University in the USA, and now, I am pursuing a PhD in Digital Humanities at the University of Sheffield in the UK. The name of the degree may fail to capture what I really study, but what I can say is that I’m inching towards what I aspire to explore. Last spring, I even interviewed for the position of a linguistic data manager at Cambridge Dictionary. Somehow, I could complete almost all the data challenges. The once baseless dream has now been less baseless.

Continue reading “On starting a new journey”