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.

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.

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.

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 🤖

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!

One week left to apply as a junior researcher to join our team in Tartu! We are accepting applications until May 15th (international candidates for the Phd position). If you're interested in joining the DigiTS team with your own unique research ideas, see more at tinyurl.com/digits-hiring!

Our centre is hiring- and so are our partners at the UT Faculty of Social Sciences! Both PhD students as well as experienced researchers are sought after- if you're interested in digital humanities, check out the ads below! tinyurl.com/digitsut

Last month, we celebrated the launch of the Centre for Digital Text Scholarship. The aim of the centre is to bring together an interdisciplinary research team to conduct cutting-edge research in text-based digital humanities and improve DH teaching at the University of Tartu.