Photo: Elina Vaahensalo
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland offers a comprehensive set of resources, tools and services in a high-performance environment. Elina Vaahensalo tells us about her research on confrontation and otherness in online discussions.
I am Elina Vaahensalo, doctoral researcher in Digital Culture at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Turku, in the Degree Programme in Digital Culture, Landscape and Cultural Heritage. In addition, at the beginning of October I will start as a researcher in the Academy project SoliPro (”Solidariteetit käytäntöön – Nuorten arkiyhteisöt tunnustuksen lähteenä ja ehkäisevän sosiaalityön areenana”), coordinated by the University of Tampere.
In my dissertation, I examine online discussion that produces otherness, especially from the perspective of anonymous Finnish-language online communities. I am interested in how confrontation, alienation and even violent hostility are constructed in Finnish-language online discussion cultures, and what different forms the concept of otherness takes in these cultures. Otherness is a fruitful conceptual starting point for research on online discussions because it can be used in a variety of ways to outline descriptions of community, group identities, and the sense of being an outsider or downgraded and different. In Finnish-language online discussions, otherness takes very different – and also contradictory – forms: the other can be an enemy who is violently and dehumanisingly opposed, but also a relatable fellow sufferer with whom one shares common, peer-based experiences of marginalisation.
In addition, my colleague Lilli Sihvonen and I have studied online cultures from the framework of media archaeology. In particular, we are interested in what happens when a cybercultural phenomenon or object – a meme that has gone viral or a social media platform – dies, and what kind of afterlife can be associated with it. Our interest is driven by the perception of the vulnerability of digital phenomena. In our view, online phenomena in Finnish, for example, are particularly vulnerable because they often do not spread globally and are therefore not stored very widely online. In storing Finnish-language online cultural phenomena, Kielipankki has therefore done a valuable job by depositing online discussions from both the Suomi24 forum and the Ylilauta forum.
In my research for the SoliPro project, I will continue my work on othering, but from an even more robust perspective of community and solidarity. My aim is to examine the descriptions of community, otherness and solidarity shared by young people on social media.
In my more recent research, I have used qualitative and ethnographic online discussion data that was collected by myself, but the Suomi24 data from Kielipankki also plays an important role for the beginning of my research career. In 2017, I started as a research assistant in the ”Citizen Mindscapes” consortium project, funded by the Research Council of Finland. The project, where I also wrote my Master’s thesis, was built around the Suomi24 data from Kielipankki. Already then, I developed the concept of othering online discourse, and tested its identification and quantitative measurement using the Suomi24 data. Experimenting with corpus-based research was quite a dive into the unknown for a cultural researcher such as myself. However, with all its challenges, it was a valuable lesson to see how working on Master’s thesis provides opportunities to try out different research tools – also outside one’s own comfort zone.
From time to time, I also teach digital culture students, and my teaching focuses on the tools and methods that can be used for conducting qualitative research on online discussions. I always encourage my students to use the online discussion corpora in Kielipankki, as they are unique collections of Finnish online culture, and they also prove that the language used online is worth saving and remembering.
Vaahensalo, E., & Sihvonen, L. (2022). Elävät, kuolleet ja elävät kuolleet keskustelufoorumit: verkkoyhteisöjen elämänvaiheet ja niiden tutkiminen. In R. Mähkä, M. Ahonen, N. Heikkilä, S. Ollitervo, & M. Räsänen (Eds.), Kulttuurihistorian tutkimusmenetelmät (pp. 411-429). Turun yliopisto.
Vaahensalo, E. (2022). ”Uuniin siitä” – Väkivaltainen ja toiseuttava verkkokeskustelu Ylilaudalla. Lähikuva – audiovisuaalisen kulttuurin tieteellinen julkaisu, 35(3), 29–44. https://doi.org/10.23994/lk.121893
Vaahensalo, E. (2022). Organisaatiot ja toiseuttava verkkokeskustelu. In H. Kantanen & M. Koskela (Eds.), Procomma Academic 2022: Poikkeuksellinen viestintä. ProCom – Viestinnän ammattilaiset ry. https://doi.org/10.31885/2022.00001
Vaahensalo, E. (2021). Samanlaista toiseuttamista, erilaisia toisia: Toiseuttavan verkkokeskustelun muodot anonyymeissä suomenkielisissä keskustelukulttuureissa. Media & Viestintä, 44(3), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.23983/mv.111507
Vaahensalo, E. (2021). Kontekstualisointimalli sosiaalisen median lähdekritiikin avaimena. Informaatiotutkimus, 40(3), 110–141. https://doi.org/10.23978/inf.107897
Vaahensalo, E. (2021). Creating the other in online interaction: Othering online discourse theory. In J. Bailey, A. Flynn, & N. Henry (Eds.), Handbook on technology-facilitated violence and abuse: International perspectives and experiences (pp. 227-246). Emerald Studies on Digital Crime, Technology & Social Harms. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211016
Suominen, J., Saarikoski, P., & Vaahensalo, E. (2019). Digitaalisia kohtaamisia: Verkkokeskustelut BBS-purkeista sosiaaliseen mediaan. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers of Social Sciences and Humanities to use, refine, preserve and share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.
All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive. This article is also published on the website of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki.
