Marttila's PhD thesis combined four of his main interests: editorial theory, mediaeval food, digital humanities methodology and historical linguistics. His MA degree, also from Helsinki, combined English philology with comparative literature, mediaeval studies and cultural anthropology, reflecting his varied interests and cross-disciplinary orientation. He is also a long-time member of the Scientific thought-styles project where he has participated in the design and compilation of linguistic corpora of historical medical writing, and a founding member of the DECL project, which provided an initial context for the methodological part of his PhD thesis. He is currently working on a grant from Kone Foundation, writing a book on editing historical manuscripts for the purposes of corpus linguistics, based on the theoretical part of his PhD thesis.
PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher
E-mail: ville.marttila(at)helsinki.fi
My research interests are mainly located at the intersection of Digital Humanities, traditional philology and historical corpus linguistics. They include a variety of topics from the diachronic development and interrelations of recipes and other related practical genres of writing, to the editing of historical texts and editorial theory, to the creation of digital editions for the purposes of historical corpus linguistics, and to the pragmatically oriented study of historical texts, focusing especially on how their intended use and audience is reflected in their textual and paratextual features. On a more technical side, I am interested in developing annotation and presentation systems for the effective use of digital editions and linguistic corpora, and generally in using technology to do cool things in the context of historical linguistics and humanities research in general.
I finished my PhD thesis, a corpus-linguistically oriented TEI XML based digital edition of a family of six Late Medieval culinary recipe collections, in 2014. After my PhD, I have worked in the DYLAPS project, converting corpora previously produced by the other project members from legacy formats into a more modern TEI XML format, and participated in the compilation of the third part of The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing 1375-1800 as a member of the Scientific Thought Styles project. In 2015 I received funding from Kone Foundation for writing the editorial theory part of my thesis into a book, which work I begun at the beginning of 2016.