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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the idea and concept of ”Finnish elite culture” as it is expected to emerge in the recently launched interdisciplinary research project ”The consortium Computational History and the Transformation of Public Discourse in Finland, 1640–1910".

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the idea and concept of "Finnish elite culture" as it is expected to emerge in the recently launched interdisciplinary research project COMHIS, that is "The consortium Computational His¬tory and the Transformation of Pub¬lic Discourse in Finland, 1640-1910". By utilizing library catalogue metadata and full textmining of all the digitized Finnish newspapers and journals published before 1910 (roughly two million pages), the COMHIS project is able to achieve groundbreaking, qualitatively new kind of understanding of how e.g. language barriers between Finnish and Swedish interacted in the period, how elites became mingled in popular debate, and how "domestication" of transnational influences into the Finnish public discourse took place.

Membership of an elite conventionally indicates inhabiting an exceptionally favourable position in some significant relationships of power, and/or strongly advantageous access to economic, cultural or social capital. In this paper we discuss how choices concerning techniques of digitalized textmining and methods of abstraction and visualization in getting command of the mining's results are best put into dialogue with a) the evolving and refined conceptualization of key changes in the Finnish elite culture through centuries, b) nature and scope of various power positions/powerful actors that get enacted in the research material, and c) possibilities to trace "roads invisible and roads not taken". The last item means reading the research material as space of potential realities or possible worlds; tracking, for example, such important historical turning points where things arguably could have turned otherwise than they actually did.