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Suomessa saatetaan muutaman vuoden kuluessa aloittaa korkea-aktiivisen ydinjätteen loppusijoitus ensimmäisenä maailmassa. Aiemmat loppusijoituslaitokset maailmalla tallentavat toisenlaista, vähemmän säteilevää ja vaarallista ydinjätettä kuin käytettyä ydinpolttoainetta, jolle on kaivettu loppusijoitustilat syvälle Eurajoen Olkiluodon kallioperään. Tässä artikkelissa poraudutaan ensi kertaa siihen, minkä verran ja kuinka Suomessa keskusteltiin ydinjätehuollon kaukaisesta tulevaisuudesta 1980-luvulla, jolloin atomisemiotiikan kehitys alkoi Yhdysvalloissa. Sen ajatusten ja merkkien avulla oli tarkoitus varoittaa ihmisiä ydinjätteen vaaroista vielä vuosituhansien kuluttua.

The digital collections of newspapers have given rise to a growing interest in studying them with computational methods. This article contributes to this discussion by presenting a method for detec...

A group of engineers and architects established a technical society in Tampere 128 years ago in 1893. In 2018, Tampere Technical Society turned 125 years. To celebrate its accomplishments and longevity, the Society published a book called Tekniikkaa hyvässä Seurassa. The Finnish title translates roughly ‘about technology in good company’. The volume is a result of an extensive research project funded by the Society. The project aimed at studying the intertwined histories of the City of Tampere, the Society, and its members from the early 1890s until the 2010s. This article introduces the Society and summarises its historical developments in English based on the book.

Historical scholarship is currently undergoing a digital turn. All historians have experienced this change in one way or another, by writing on word processors, applying quantitative methods on digitalized source materials, or using internet resources and digital tools. Digital Histories showcases this emerging wave of digital history research. It presents work by historians who – on their own or through collaborations with e.g. information technology specialists – have uncovered new, empirical historical knowledge through digital and computational methods. The topics of the volume range from the medieval period to the present day, including various parts of Europe. The chapters apply an exemplary array of methods, such as digital metadata analysis, machine learning, network analysis, topic modelling, named entity recognition, collocation analysis, critical search, and text and data mining. The volume argues that digital history is entering a mature phase, digital history ‘in action’, where its focus is shifting from the building of resources towards the making of new historical knowledge. This also involves novel challenges that digital methods pose to historical research, including awareness of the pitfalls and limitations of the digital tools and the necessity of new forms of digital source criticisms. Through its combination of empirical, conceptual and contextual studies, Digital Histories is a timely and pioneering contribution taking stock of how digital research currently advances historical scholarship.

The chapter introduces the main themes of “Digital Histories”. It shortly discusses the histories of digital history and the various research projects that resulted in this volume, as well as the main contributions of the individual chapters. Focusing on the most recent periods of development of digital and computational history, the introduction explains how this book contributes to advancing the larger field of history in two primary ways: firstly through conceptual explorations of the central issues characterizing the past, present and future of digital history research, and secondly by providing new empirical historical knowledge coming out of research using digital methods. The chapter surveys a number of key challenges and criticisms facing contemporary and future historians, including the digitisation of sources, metadata creation for digital source materials, digital source and resource criticism, and the various salient questions involved in organising digital history research.

To understand better the present shape and evolution of the digital history, this chapter examines how historians have used computers and information technology since the 1960s. Focusing on historians from Finland, the chapter starts from the late 1960s when a few younger historians first explored using the computer to perform statistical calculations. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the computers and data available were most useful and used for historical research designs applying quantitative methods. Historians carrying out qualitative research grew interested in IT when the personal computers became more user-friendly and affordable towards and especially during the 1990s. In the following decade, the internet, the World Wide Web, and digitized source materials effected all historians’ research practices directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, digital or computational history introduced in the mid-2010s took the use of IT further. These new methods were first embraced by a fraction of those historians who had previously focused on quantitative work based on textual materials. A central conclusion is that historians should pay more attention to the technologies they use to take better control of the challenges and opportunities of their changing research environment.

IBM Finland, a small national subsidiary, was at once a Finnish business and an interface to much larger networks of technological innovation and knowledge sharing. We contextualize its development within a nested set of institutions and identities: IBM's Nordic operations, its European business, and its World Trade Corporation. Its development was profoundly shaped by Finland's unique geopolitical position during the Cold War. IBM's internal structures anticipated and paralleled those of the European Union, with mechanisms for international cooperation, for the creation of transnational identities, and for the resolution and regulation of disputes between national subsidiaries.

In the decade after the Second World War IBM rebuilt its European operations as integrated, wholly owned subsidiaries of its World Trade Corporation, chartered in 1949. Long before the European common market eliminated trade barriers, IBM created its own internal networks of trade, allocating the production of different components and products between its new subsidiaries. Their exchange relationships were managed centrally to ensure that no European subsidiary was a consistent net importer. At the heart of this system were eight national electric typewriter plants, each assembling parts produced by other European countries. IBM promoted these transnational typewriters as symbols of a new and peaceful Europe and its leader, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., was an enthusiastic supporter of early European moves toward economic integration. We argue that IBM’s humble typewriter and its innovative system of distributed manufacturing laid the groundwork for its later domination of the European computer business and provided a model for the development of transnational European institutions.

The development and transfer of computing technology in postwar Czechoslovakia and Finland, two countries lying directly on the border between the two cold war blocs, were shaped by a mix of factors, from the political to the technological, in both countries. This article describes and analyzes the factors influencing the transfer of computing technology in cold war Europe on the basis of comparison of the national histories of these two frontier countries. Although the first computers were put into operation in the two countries during the second half of the 1950s, Czechoslovakia’s industrial tradition concealed its gradual lagging behind Finland. During the postwar decade, the possibility of the transfer of computing technology and practices was a crucial factor in the spreading of computing technology in both countries. It was the commercial transfer of computers from the West to Finland that made their availability there, until the mid-1970s, relatively grow to three times that of Czechoslovakia. However, while the physical transfer of actual computers across the Iron Curtain was difficult, the intangible transfer of related ideas, designs, and practices was much easier. Moreover, it was not only politics that affected this technological development, but technology was also used to affect politics and form political ties.

The paper concerns the Alwac and Wegematic computer usage in the Nordic countries focussing on the Southern Finnish town of Turku. This topic has received little academic attention and frequently forgotten. In the paper, we examine the actions that the two universities and involved companies in the Turku region took after they had accepted the donation of a Wegematic 1000 computer. We argue that the Turku Computing Centre, created in 1960, firstly made an effort to combine scientific and educational aspects and commercial service in its activity and, secondly, participated in and benefited from establishing Nordic co-operation among the users of Wegematic computers. Therefore, we conclude that this Wegematic story is important for understanding the early phases of computerisation in Finland, at least outside the capital region of the country. We suggest the same could be true in Sweden and Norway. Further, we suggest that other Wegematic stories might be worth studying to improve our understanding of the Nordic trans-local interaction in early computing. Finally, we suggest applying a comparative method for these future studies.

In this article, the first Finnish computer construction, previously claimed to have produced only an out-dated machine, is studied as an integral part of an attempt to establish a national computer center in Finland. I argue that the aim of the Finnish Committee for Mathematical Machines (1954–1960) was more similar to its Swedish and Danish counterparts than has been recognized, even though the Finnish Committee decided to duplicate a German Gla computer in 1954. The similarity with Sweden and Denmark arises from the aim of the Committee to establish a national computing center, like the ones in Stockholm and Copenhagen, in Helsinki during its first two years. Furthermore, this plan for the national computing center, or the building of a single computer, the ESKO, did not gain the support it needed either from the state nor the former punched card machine users, because of the politically and economically difficult situation in post-war Finnish society. In the uncertain economic year of 1956, the Finnish punched card customers of IBM decided to continue collaborating with IBM alone. Moreover, IBM also benefited by receiving expert work force educated in the Committee’s computer construction project. Hopefully this Finnish case, being unsuccessful and therefore unlike other Scandinavian countries, can also assist in further comprehending the preconditions that lead to more successful developments like those in Sweden and Denmark.

This paper studies Finnish historians’ contact and collaboration with their colleagues in neighboring countries from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, focusing on exchanges concerning the use of computers for historical research. Computers were used by some historians in the Soviet Union, in particular Soviet Estonia, as well as in Sweden and other Nordic countries. With the former, historians in Finland organized regular symposiums starting in 1971; and with the latter, Finnish historians completed joint Nordic research projects during the 1970s. Both forms of collaboration resulted in a stream of publications. Further exchanges took place at seminars and Nordic conferences. The approach in this study is transnational, and the paper argues that this approach helps us understand better the deep roots of Nordic collaboration in the early digital humanities, and more broadly, the spread and circulation of humanities computing internationally.