Professor Eero Hyvönen (http://seco.cs.aalto.fi/u/eahyvone/) has been appointed as the director of HELDIG, Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities. Professor Hyvönen has a long history of collaboration with the humanities, social science and memory organisations in Finland. He is internationally a highly regarded scholar in the digital humanities and he has successfully been running Semantic Computing Research Group at Aalto University for years (http://seco.cs.aalto.fi/mission/). Hyvönen is also a pioneer of open science in Finland and his international networks reach far and wide. He currently acts, for example, as a group leader in the Reassembling the Republic of Letters project that includes over 30 countries (http://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/rrl/).

Arto Mustajoki, Dean of Faculty of Arts, commented: ”Eero is an excellent scholar in this field with a wide range of international contacts. We are happy to have him in this position. This strengthens also our cooperation with Aalto University.”

HELDIG, Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities, is a new initiative that will complement the work done thus far in Helsinki Digital Humanities. HELDIG is partly funded by the profiling measure of the Finnish Academy (http://www.aka.fi/en/research-and-science-policy/yliopistojen-profiloituminen/). This funding to strengthen the university’s research profile means that in the near future there will be new tenure track professors (as well as associated graduate students and postdocs) working in connection to Digital Humanities that is one core area of the strategy of the University of Helsinki. HELDIG will function as a network that connects different faculties and departments in a transdisciplinary manner.