DigiTS

Our Researcher in Digital Humanities, Thiago Dumont Oliveira has published a paper investigating the changing nature of French drama between 1700-1900. Results indicate the topical distribution of French drama changed profoundly after the French Revolution. Read more: arxiv.org/abs/2602.00588

Our Researcher in Digital Humanities, @botondszemes.bsky.social spoke about Central European literary memory as reflected in Wikipedia and the possible use of LLMs in cleaning Wikidata query results on a workshop Vienna on January 23rd, focusing on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and literary studies.

This week's article, accessible at www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10...., was picked by our Junior Researcher B. Bhattacharyya, who is writing her PhD thesis "Typologies of deception: Exploring Metalinguistic Features and Narrative Framing in Estonian and Hindi Disinformation Ecosystems with LLMs".

Ever wonder if there's a specific “language” to Disinformation? The DigiTS reading group discussed N. Lebbernegg's, @jamoeberl.bsky.social & co's “Do You Speak Disinformation?” which explores how explainable machine learning can be used to spot deceptive news articles based on style & structure.

What is ETIS, how are publications classified, where to find information about funding opportunities and how to avoid predatory journals? Our week started off with learning! See the slides by UT Grant Office's K. Lauk at sisu.ut.ee/wp-content/u.... All DigiTS materials are available on our website.

It's -8°C, but the DigiTS reading group goes on. This week we discussed gender bias in LLMs. In a man's world, LLMs reproduce stereotypes and can amplify uneven power dynamics. Gender studies and political economy thus remain essential to reflect upon the future of AI.

What a year! Wishing everyone a beautiful end of the year and a joyful 2026!
Picture: Prof. Liina Lindström being awarded 💫 'Project of the Year' for DigiTS at the UT Faculty of Arts and Humanities Christmas party. Photo: Kaimar T. Tamm.

DigiTS has been selected as the Project of the Year 2025 by the University of Tartu Faculty of Arts and Humanities! 🎉 Thank you for the recognition- it’s wonderful to see our impact reaching beyond our own Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics.

This week at the DigiTS' reading group we discussed @pascaleispunk.bsky.social @alielassche.bsky.social et al's very interesting paper on the canonicity of Danish novels during the Modern Breakthrough. 🇩🇰 After all, why do some novels make it into the canon and others don't? 🤷‍♀️

Last week, our centre hosted the seminar Large Language Models and the Estonian Language: the State of the Art, followed by a fruitful roundtable discussion with local experts. All slides of the presentations are now accessible at our website: digits.ut.ee/events/.

November may be Estonia's gloomiest month but going to a bog + culture hunt is never a bad idea. 🚶Pictures from the team's first day trip to Southern Estonia last week- Meenikunno bog + Värska Farm Museum, where we enjoyed learning about Seto culture and got the chance to hear Seto leelo singing.

DigiTS weekly reading club has kicked off! 🎭 On the 1st meeting, our DH researcher Botond Szemes's recent paper on comp. approaches to Shakeaspeare was discussed. Interestingly, his analysis suggested lexicon-based and LLM-based approaches produce similar sentiment arcs for Shakespeare’s plays.

Link to sign up: tinyurl.com/llm-estonian
More information: digihum.ut.ee/en/news/semi...

Registration for the event Large Language Models and the Estonian Language: the State of the Art still open until 15.11. Join in person or via Zoom! The event will be opened by Prof. Maciej Eder, followed by experts from the Institute of the Estonian Language & UT Institute of Computer Science.

Welcome to DigiTS, Thiago Dumont Oliveira! Thiago's research bridges computational linguistics, network analysis, intellectual history and cultural history. He is currently investigating the evolution of Italian, French and German libretti in the 17th and 18th centuries using NLP techniques.

Seminar on large language models and the Estonian language on November 19 On November 19 from 14:00 to 16:00, the University of Tartu Centre for Digital Humanities will host an English-language seminar titled Large Language Models and the Estonian Language: the State of the...

On Nov 19 at 14-16 (EET), DigiTS is organising a hybrid seminar on LLM-s and the Estonian language, focussing on how Estonian language data are currently being collected for AI development & what strategies are used to assess quality and create benchmarking frameworks. digihum.ut.ee/en/news/semi...

Meet Kristiina Vaik (PhD in Linguistics),Researcher in Digital Humanities since this month!🔌Her work centers on corpus & computational linguistics and NLP, with particular interest in text classification and Web corpora. Before UT, she worked as data scientist at TEXTA, local language tech start-up.

Sign up for the ERC info event here: ut.ee/en/news/erc-...
Our project's head, Prof. Maciej Eder will be sharing his experience as an evaluator of ERC applications.
Information on the LLM event coming soon!

Autumn at DigiTS 2/2: meetings with Lit. museum & Cybernetica to provide input for the new HumLab; MEDAL conference; meeting with ERC grantholder L. Kanger and upcoming participation at ERC info event. In Nov, we'll also be hosting an event on Estonian language technologists' involvement in LLMs!

Autumn at DigiTS 1/2: lectures, 🍁 walks, meetings. When work starts to feel overwhelming, it’s good to go on a hike, but if even the colours of trail markers remind you of the project's logo, it's time to accept fate. 😝
By the end of next week, our entire team will be complete. Above excited!

On Oct 1, we were joined by Botond Szemes (PhD in Literary Studies). His research explores computational approaches to literature, including stylometry, quantitative drama analysis and network theory, as well as the role of statistical methods and data visualization in knowledge production. Welcome!

On Oct 9-10, a conference on Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics is taking place in Tartu! Today, J. Wilbur is presenting his recent work on Pite Sámi and 3 of our new people- S. Kriuchkova, B. Szemes and B. Bhattacharyya are presenting their 📈 research posters. More info at medal.ut.ee! Welcome!

Welcome aboard, Sofia Kriuchkova! Sofia is a Junior Researcher interested in grammar, language variation, sociolinguistics, and gender studies in linguistics. Her dissertation focuses on differences in the language use of Estonian-speaking men and women.

Last week, we participated at our institute's 🔎 Research Day. Prof. L. Lindström gave students and colleagues an overview of DigiTS and talked about opportunities offered. Each year, we aim to hire 2 humanities/computer science students 👫to provide valuable experience to future academics.

Happy to have hosted Erika Iwasaki and Kayoko Kawai from Tokyo National Museum who told us about DH initiatives in Japan and showed us their digital collections. We discussed popularising DH in Japan and Estonia, talked about our centre and future plans- and how AI might change it all.

We're happy to welcome Bhumika Bhattacharyya from Kolkata, India to our team! The new Junior Researcher is focused on computational linguistics and digital humanities, with particular interest in low-resource Indic languages, hate speech detection, and content moderation. Tere tulemast!, Bhumika!

New semester is approaching! Several of our centre's courses have been renewed, such as Data Science and Digital Humanities! 10 lecturers from various disciplines will be teaching, using datasets from archaeology, literature, political science, etc. 🤖 Registrer now: tinyurl.com/digihumdata 🤖

More information: digihum.ut.ee/en/news/cent...

It's been an eventful spring at the Center with various meetings with UT units & the Institute of the Estonian Language to find new ways of collaboration & advance teaching DH. We also had a bike tour for our new visiting professor, Maciej Eder! ⏰Still one week to apply and join our team in Tartu!

Please note the application period for Estonian candidates is June 1-15. If you're interested in the position of research fellow, applications are open for everyone until June 2! 👁️👁️