Shades of Red

“Skillfully integrating labour history, the history of concepts and digital humanities, Shades of Red is a comprehensive and detailed examination of Finnish socialism and its vernacular varieties. An essential case study for students of socialist mobilisations in late imperial Russia and across the globe, as well as political languages in general.”
-Wiktor Marzec, PhD., University of Warsaw

"Shades of Red is a compelling, inspiring book that combines close and distant reading in a novel way. This is an original contribution to the emerging field of digital history.”
-Professor Hannu Salmi, University of Turku

”Shades of Red is a significant intellectual achievement. It is methodologically innovative, empirically sound and theoretically well-grounded.”
-Professor Emeritus Pauli Kettunen

Socialist movements sprang up throughout Europe during the long nineteenth century, but the largest socialist party emerged in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Shades of Red reconstructs the most powerful political language of its era by reading manually and computationally handwritten and printed newspapers. The main research questions focus on the evolutionary characteristics of socialism: how did it change over time, what were the ideological similarities and differences between the top and the bottom of the labour movement, and how did socialism relate to other political languages of Finnish modernity? The book extends the scope of the history of ideas qualitatively from the elite thinkers to the common people, who did not think of politics for a living, and quantitatively to datasets so vast that they elude mere human cognition.

Risto Turunen is a Postdoctoral Researcher specialising in data-intensive approaches to modern political languages. He was awarded his doctorate in History at Tampere University in 2021.