Articles by author: tfriedman

  • History grad draws on Co-op skills to build heritage career 

    Monday, August 11, 2025 | By

    History alumnus Jared Shawcross (BA 2020, MA 2021), acting heritage interpretation officer with Parks Canada, recently appeared on Breakfast Television to give a hands-on introduction to HMCS Haida, a destroyer used during World War II and the Korean War. The ship is now a national historic site stationed in Hamilton (Ont.) Harbour.

    https://www.breakfasttelevision.ca/videos/hop-aboard-hmcs-haida-and-learn-the-rich-history-of-canadas-most-fightingest-ship/

    (Jared appears at about 4:56, but it’s worth watching the whole thing.)

    This news comes to us from History alumna (and Jared’s partner) Katherine Foran (BA 2019, MA 2021), who reports that Jared successfully “built connections through his Co-op placements that brought him to the career he has today.” Katherine is currently a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Guelph.

    Well done, Jared!

    For more information about visiting the ship site: https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/on/haida

    Categories: News

  • 2022-23 History Speaker Series

    Wednesday, October 19, 2022 | By

    Mikko Tolonen (University of Helsinki)

    Data-Driven Approach to the Study of the Enlightenment

    Tuesday, 25 October 2022
    TH 259, 1:00-2:30pm

    This talk aims to envision how the use of machine learning and data-driven approaches can become an everyday practice for historians in the not-too-distant future. Drawing from the lessons learned from a decade of collaborative work at an interdisciplinary Helsinki Computational History Group (COMHIS), the talk will discuss the group’s research strategy and some of their recent studies of the Enlightenment. COMHIS has worked to harmonize and integrate metadata and full text sources, including the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The talk will introduce the concept of bibliographic data science and use it to examine the representativeness and biases in ECCO. Of the many down-stream use cases, the talk will focus on eighteenth-century reception studies and networks of publishing in the Scottish Enlightenment. The talk will end with a demonstration of the possibilities of using unstructured ECCO data and large language model (BERT) for clustering eighteenth-century subject topics that feeds back to the ESTC metadata creating a virtuous circle in the research use of the available data.

    Mikko Tolonen PhD is Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki. His background is in intellectual history, and he is the PI of Helsinki Computational History Group (COMHIS). His main research focus is on an integrated study of public discourse and knowledge production that combines metadata from library catalogues as well as full-text archives of books, newspapers and periodicals in early modern Europe. Tolonen works also in other areas of Enlightenment studies. Currently he is leading two Academy of Finland projects: Rise of Commercial Society and Eighteenth-Century Publishing (RiCEP); and Detection of Historical Discourses with High-Performance Computing (HPC-HD).

    All welcome

    More about Mikko Tolonen:

    Mikko Tononen, 375 Humanists, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki
    https://375humanistia.helsinki.fi/en/humanists/mikko-tolonen

    Mikko Tolonen, Publications
    https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/mikko-tolonen

    Helsinki Computational History Group, Computational History, University of Helsinki
    https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/computational-history

    HPC-HD High Performance Computing for the Detection and Analysis of Historical Discourses
    https://hpc-hd.github.io/

    “Rise of Commercial Society and Eighteenth-Century Publishing” (RICEP), 2020-2024
    https://blogs.helsinki.fi/c18-publishing/

    “Teaching Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki,” Council for European Studies (CES), Europe Now, Campus Dispatches, September 10, 2019 https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/09/09/teaching-digital-humanities-at-the-university-of-helsinki/

    Categories: Events

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