The aim of bringing together this consortium of humanists and computer science researchers, is to interrogate an unused treasure in the major Finnish cultural heritage institutions, namely the registered epistolary metadata in the collections of archives, libraries, and museums, from the period of the Grand Duchy of Finland (1809–1917). This is the first project to explore this data in a systematic and comprehensive way and to enrich and analyse it to answer ambitious research questions. On the humanistic side we study the following themes: quantitative epistolary culture 2) social change and communication, 3) Networks of class and gender. The main computational research themes are: 1) metadata harmonisation, semantic reconciliation, and metadata enrichment, 2) social network analysis, 3) knowledge discovery. The main end-results will be a Linked Open Data publication and an online semantic portal with data analysis tooling and a series of scholarly articles.

2021

2025