Digital Labour History

The typesetting room at Helsingin Sanomat, 1975. Photo: Finnish Labour Archives.

Mass digitization of archival sources, novel computational methods, and the rise of the digital public sphere encourage us to re-think how to write labour history in the twenty-first century. This track welcomes empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions that scrutinize the “digital turn” in the context of labour history. Rather than focusing on a single topic, this track provides room for discussions that span various domains of labour history in the digital age. The papers may, for example, analyze the transformation of historical primary sources into a dataset (what is the added value for research, what is lost), or introduce methodologically innovative case studies (such as network analysis, text mining, or time-series analysis), or conceptualize the ruptures and continuities between traditional quantitative social history and the most recent wave of digital history. This track brings together researchers, archivists, and librarians who want to push the emerging field of digital labour history further, especially in the Nordic countries.

Coordinator: Risto Turunen, Post-Doctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki, National Coordinator for DARIAH-FI (risto.turunen[at]tuni.fi)