Rate My Professor Tuomo Hiippala

Tuomo Hiippala is Professor of English Language and Digital Humanities in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki, a position he has held since 2024, where he leads the Multimodality Research Group. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in English Philology from the University of Helsinki in 2014, supervised by Eija Ventola, following a Master of Arts in English Philology in 2007 and a Bachelor of Arts in English Philology with minors in Communication, General Linguistics, and Russian and East European Studies in 2005. His career includes postdoctoral research at the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä from 2015 to 2016 and at the Digital Geography Lab at the University of Helsinki in 2017. He holds the Title of Docent in Multimodality Research and Digital Methods from the University of Turku since 2022 and has progressed through assistant and associate professor roles in the Department of Languages. Hiippala is affiliated with the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, the Helsinki Institute of Urban and Regional Studies, and supervises doctoral students in the Doctoral Programme in Language Studies and the Doctoral Programme in Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences.

Hiippala's research focuses on multimodality, investigating how natural language interacts with photographs, illustrations, diagrams, layouts, and other modes in communicative situations, with applications to artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and computer vision in the humanities. His major publications include the books Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis – A Problem-Oriented Introduction (De Gruyter, 2017, co-authored with John A. Bateman and Janina Wildfeuer) and The Structure of Multimodal Documents: An Empirical Approach (Routledge, 2015). Recent works encompass Corpus-based insights into multimodality and genre in primary school science diagrams (Visual Communication, 2026), Introducing the diagrammatic semiotic mode (Diagrams 2022, co-authored with John A. Bateman, Best Paper Award), and Semiotically-grounded distant viewing of diagrams: insights from two multimodal corpora (Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2022). He has received the Best Paper Award at the 13th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams (2022), runner-up for best paper at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, membership in Young Academy Finland (2018–2022), the TUHAT prize (2025), and the yearly award for the best Master's thesis (2007). Hiippala leads the ERC-funded project FOUNDATIONS: A Foundation for Empirical Multimodality Research (2024–2029) and other initiatives on crowdsourcing and multimodal corpora.