The common thread running through Jessica Parland-von Essen’s research is the semiotics of culture theory and its concepts, even though it has been important to her to write all of her articles and books in such a way that they open through an individual person’s life and values.

I completed my first university studies in the beginning of the 1990s at a time when the students occupied the administration building and instituted a democratic form of government. It was perhaps a golden age in a sense, when studies were still rather unregulated and university culture was alive.

During her studies Jessica Parland-von Essen was active in the student organisation Historicus and she was one of the founding members of the Finnish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has also worked in the board of the Genealogical Society of Finland and the Finnish Wikimedia, which maintains Wikipedia.

Data flows through everything. Pictures, texts, sound, videos, games, films, Twitter, money, research – everything has changed into a single stream if bits which zips around the world through the air and through cables, and which is stored on servers around the world.