Helsinki Institue for Social Science and Humanities (HSSH) University of Helsinki

by Craig Ryder, SOAS University of London

My first view of Finland was from the airplane window: an endless white expanse. It was stark, bleak, cold. My lasting memory of my placement in Helsinki is, however, something quite different. Only weeks after I arrived in April 2022, Spring arrived, and the city went into accelerated bloom. Buds flowered, ice melted, and smiles proliferated. The Nordic sun barely going down before another day of coffee, salmon and beer; the three cornerstones of the Finnish diet.

I had organised my placement at Helsinki Institue for Social Science and Humanities (HSSH) with the express intention of collaborating with Matti Pohjonen, a leading expert in the nascent field of digital anthropology. Matti had agreed to be my placement supervisor and we had plans to learn new computational approaches to social science and deliver one piece of leading-edge research. His regional expertise is Ethiopia, and my PhD is focussed on Sri Lanka, and while these two countries are world's part geographically, ethnically, and spiritually, we had a hunch that we could connect them through the debates on hate speech on social media. We had noticed that when the mainstream media reports on the moral panics around social media, around fake news, political polarisation and hate speech, media outlets would often casually say, “in countries like Ethipoa, Myanmar and Sri Lanka” referring to these countries ongoing and historic ethnic tensions. This developed our research question: why does the Western media conflates these deep-entrenched and diverse ethnic conflicts with social media? Moreover, is this merely lazy journalism or is there something egregious underpinning their “analysis”?

I will not go into all the gritty details of completing the research, or our findings, but I'm happy to report our goals have (so far) been achieved:

We accessed the Twitter API through a programming language called twarc (Python) and we downloaded tens of thousands of tweets from our two countries of interest on the relevant topics of content moderation and internet shutdowns

We completed deep analysis of the data using data visualising tool, Gephi

We submitted a research abstract to a special issue for publication in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics and we were accepted

We authored an article together and submitted for publication (it is currently under peer review)

The reason my placement has been so beneficial and why I strategically planned it this way was the singular learning experience of working closely with a leading scholar and get my first peer-reviewed journal article under my belt. From my perspective, the UK’s PhD assessment system of one long (unpublished) monograph puts us at a comparative disadvantage to our European contemporaries whose PhD completion is based on the publication of three journal articles. My move to a European university enabled me to on the career-ladder of producing high-quality research for publication before my PhD is finished. Moreover, I got to do in a splendid city!

I would whole-heartedly recommend any CHASE-researchers to consider a placement as a research assistant to a scholar you admire. I now feel much more prepared to complete my own journal articles going forward. Journal articles require a specifically structured and almost unnatural writing style that has a very steep learning curve. Because of this, I had to fashion the time of outside of my PhD to get to grips with it. Furthermore, my relationship with everyone at HSSH is incredibly positive and I have established a potential post-doc destination for the future.