Prof. Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen of the University of Oulu and chair of the ALLC: The European
Association for Digital Humanities, passed away in Helsinki on Feb. 2, 2013 after a long illness.
She is survived by her husband, Prof. Heikki Hänninen of the University of Helsinki, and she will be
remembered by generations of digital humanists.
Lisa Lena was born in Helsinki in 1957. Her father, who she was always close to, was a career
diplomat, which promoted Lisa Lena’s growing up to be a polyglot. She had been raised with
Swedish and Finnish, and attended schools not only in Helsinki, but also in Cologne and Washington
before entering the University of Helsinki, where she studied English, Linguistics and Nordic
Philology. She spent a good deal of her undergraduate years with her parents who were then
working in Tokyo, leading to yet another language in which she worked comfortably. After taking her
first degrees in Helsinki, Lisa Lena moved to Oxford, where she pursued a D.Phil. in English literature,
specializing in Beckett, and defending her dissertation in 1991. It was also at Oxford where she first
became familiar with digital humanities through collaborations with the Oxford text archive and
especially inspired by Susan Hockey’s work.
It is fair to say that Lisa Lena never looked back. On the contrary, her scholarly interests in digital
humanities expanded from her original English literary focus to include other languages, stylometry,
authorship attribution, corpus linguistics, (pedagogically) applied linguistics, and dialectology, as
well as the use of annotation schemes such as SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and
TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). She worked as lecturer in Joensuu and Oulu before receiving her
appointment as professor of English Philology in Oulu in 2011. She also held an Honorary Research
Fellowship at the University of Glasgow. At the same time Lisa Lena worked indefatigably for the
digital humanities professional organizations, serving as secretary for ten years and most recently as
chair of the European organization.
Lisa Lena loved her work and her colleagues. She traveled a great deal in order to stay in personal
contact with others in, around and beyond our disciplines. Conferences were her normal fields of
activity, where she inevitably arrived early and stayed late, engaged everyone interested in new
opportunities for international collaboration, attending innumerable meetings and talks, always
with words of encouragement to younger scholars, with witty side remarks to those sitting nearby,
and with invitations to discuss it all at more leisure over a drink later in the evening. The invitations
were delivered in a collegial, almost conspiratorial manner! Those who accepted them were always
delighted to find a good number of colleagues engaged in friendly banter and argument.
We shall miss her for her contributions, for her welcoming and encouraging way, and for the feeling
she gave us that we were together part of a large and important movement.