Digital History of Concepts Workshop

Although the history of concepts has long roots back in the 20th century, the newly-gained access to digitised text corpora has led to an emerging ‘quantitative turn’ within the field. In contrast to other forms of large-scale text analyses in the wake of digital humanities, the history of concepts is especially well-suited for computational methods as it is keywordised-by-nature.

This workshop will through one longer and three shorter presentations discuss the digital history of concepts from a methodological point of view. Four scholars from different fields (history, media studies, economic history, literature) will problematise how the understanding of concepts can – and perhaps cannot – be quantified.

Jani Marjanen: “Methodological Lessons Learned from Three Digital History Case Studies”

Fredrik Mohammadi Norén: “Ideas of ‘Communication’ and ‘Information’ in the UNESCO Courier 1948–2020”

Elin Åström Rudberg: “New to Distant Reading: Lessons From Constructing a Comparative Study on the Late Twentieth Century ‘Turn to the Market’ in the Nordics”

Karl Berglund: “Stems, Collocations, Embeddings: Straightforward and Complex Approaches to the Concept of Climate”.

Moderator: Benjamin Martin.


Jani Marjanen is a Docent in Nordic Studies and a university lecturer in Political History at the University of Helsinki.

Fredrik Mohammadi Norén is an assistant professor in media and communication at Malmö University. He is involved as a researcher in three digital humanities-oriented projects, and as PI for the research infrastructure project "Swedish Riksdag 1867–2022: An Ecosystem of Linked Open Data" (RJ, 2023–2025).

Elin Åström Rudberg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economic History and International Relations at Stockholm University. She is also an associated researcher and coordinator in the research programme “Neoliberalism in the Nordics" (RJ, 2020–2025).

Karl Berglund is a researcher and Docent in literature, Uppsala University, and research coordinator at the Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala (CDHU). He is currently PI in “Patterns of Popularity” (VR, 2020–2023).