Virtual Valamo Conference
The Virtual Valamo project will organize an international researcher conference on May 12-15, 2026. Researchers from all over Europe will gather at the Valamo Monastery to discuss issues related to the digitization and transcription of manuscript collections.
The conference will bring together digitizers of text materials, developers of digital technologies and tools, researchers of Slavic language materials, and holders of large text collections. Speakers include representatives from the University of Freiburg, the National Archives, the National Library, the Finnish Literature Society, the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Orthodox Church Museum in Riisa.
The Valamo Monastery will also be visited by representatives from Egypt's St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai and Bulgaria's Rila Monastery.
The presentations by top researchers, open to all, will be held on Wednesday, May 13th, starting at 9:00 AM and on Thursday, May 14th, starting at 11:30 AM in the hall of the Valamo Cultural Center.
The audience will be admitted in the order of arrival, as many as the hall can accommodate.
Welcome!
Virtual Valamo Conference
Exploring New Digital Avenues for Slavonic Manuscript Cultures
Monastery of Valamo, Heinävesi
April 12–15, 2026
Wednesday 13.5
SESSION 1 - Virtual Valamo (Culture center)
9.00–9.30 Archimandrite Michael (Abbot): The Monastery of Valamo: Past and present
9.30–10.00 Pasi Hyytiäinen (Virtual Valamo): Marchlands, monks, and manuscripts: An introduction to the Valamo manuscript collection
10.00–10.30 Maria Niku (Finnish Literature Society): The Virtual Valamo online edition: technical solutions
10.30-10.45 Discussion
10:45 a.m.–11:15 a.m Coffee break (Culture center)
SESSION 2 - Slavica (Culture center)
11.15–11.45 Ilona Pelgonen (Orthodox Church Museum of Finland): Features of Working with Cyrillic Old Printed Books and Manuscripts in the Orthodox Church Museum of Finland
11.45–12.15 Sofia Penttilä (National library of Finland): Church Slavonic Manuscripts in the National Library of Finland: An Overview
12.15–12.45 Sofia Rongonen (Virtual Valamo): Reader-Author Dialogue and How to Represent it in Digital Libraries
12.45–13.00 Discussion
13.00 Lunch (Restaurant Trapesa)
SESSION 3 - Methodologies (Culture center)
14.30–15.00 Father Justin (Mount Sinai Monastery): The Sinai Palimpsests: Piercing the Mists of Time
15.00–15.30 Achim Rabus (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg): Polyscriptor: Comparing HTR for Church Slavonic
15.30–16.00 Andy Stauder (Transkribus): Specialized AI vs. General-purpose AI for Extracting Information from Analogue Documents
16.00–16.15 Discussion
16.15–16.45 Coffee break (Culture center)
Thursday 14.5
SESSION 4 - Liturgy (Main church)
9.00-11.00 Ascension Day liturgy
All conference guests are given the opportunity to participate in the liturgy of Ascension Day. Participation is not mandatory, but a chance to experience something unique.
11.00–11.30 Coffee break (Culture center)
SESSION 5 - Digital methods of analysis (Culture center)
11.30–12.00 Vojtěch Kaše (University of West Bohemia, CCS-Lab): Tracing the Histories of Conceptual Ecosystems via Contextual Embeddings and Phylogenetic Methods: The Case of Mind-Body Dualism from Antiquity to Early Modernity
12.00–12.30 Eetu Mäkelä (University of Helsinki): The Promises and pitfalls of AI for Humanities research
12.30–13.00 Armin Hoenen (Goethe University Frankfurt): Damn it! The devil is in the details: From OCR for Old Church Slavonic to Purely Visual Stemma Reconstruction
13.00–13.15 Discussion
13.15 Lunch (Restaurant Trapesa)
SESSION 6 – Digitalization (Culture center)
14.30–15.00 Günter Mühlberger (University of Innsbruck): Scansion – Connecting Archives and Volunteers for Community-driven Digitization
15.00–15.30 Sanna Joska (National Archives of Finland): AI in the Archives: Developing a Russian Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) Model at the National Archives of Finland
15.30–16.00 Kirsi Keravuori (Finnish Literature Society): Scholarly online publications of epistolary and folklore collections at the Finnish Literature Society SKS
16.00–16.15 Discussion
Wellcome!
The conference and the Virtual Valamo project are funded by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation and the Suuret Kulttuurihankkeet grant. https://kordelin.fi/
Discover the groundbreaking project: https://editiot.finlit.fi/exist/apps/valamo/index.html
More information: pasi.hyytiainen@valamo.fi
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Ask about accommodation too!
myyntipalvelu@valamo.fi or 017 570 1810
