This paper analyzes the idea and concept of ”Finnish elite culture” as it
is expected to emerge in the recently launched interdisciplinary research
project COMHIS, that is ”The
consortium Computational His­tory and the Transformation of Pub­lic Discourse
in Finland, 1640–1910”. By utilizing library catalogue metadata and full
textmining of all the digitized Finnish newspapers and journals published
before 1910 (roughly two million pages), the COMHIS project is able to achieve groundbreaking,
qualitatively new kind of understanding of how e.g. language barriers between
Finnish and Swedish interacted in the period, how elites became mingled in
popular debate, and how “domestication” of transnational influences into the Finnish
public discourse took place.

Membership of an elite conventionally
means inhabiting an exceptionally favourable position in some relationships of
power, and/or strongly advantageous access to economic, cultural or social
capital. In this paper we discuss how choices concerning techniques of digitalized
textmining and methods of abstraction and visualization in getting command of
the mining’s outcomes are best put into dialogue with a) the evolving and
refined conceptualization of key changes in the Finnish elite culture through centuries,
b) nature and scope of various power positions/powerful actors that get enacted
in the research material, and c) possibilities to trace “roads invisible and
roads not taken”. The last item means reading the research material as space of
potential realities or possible worlds; tracking, for example, such important
historical turning points where things arguably could have turned otherwise
than they actually did.