Jenna Saarni profile picture
Jenna
Saarni
Doctoral Researcher, Digital Language Studies, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish
Filosofian maisteri – Master of Arts
Attitudes and emotions in digital media

Contact

Areas of expertise

discourse analysis
digital discourse
digital media
communication and interaction studies
crisis communication
evaluation
linguistics
news media
social media

Biography

I am a doctoral researcher in digital language studies in the Utuling doctoral programme at the University of Turku.

I have worked in various in multilingual projects at the University of Turku. I have also organised international conferences (e.g., Approaches to Digital Discourse Analysis) and encouraged children and adolescents to engage with studies of language (Tiedetestaajat). I have represented doctoral researchers in the board of the graduate school UTUGS (2022-2024) and of the doctoral programme Utuling (2023-2024). I have also been a board member and responsible for communications in JUNecto ry, an association for doctoral researchers (2022-2024). I represented doctoral researchers in the research assessment project RAE (2022) and audit interview (2023). 

I have graduated as a Master of Arts in 2018 and a Bachelor of Arts in 2016 from the French department at the University of Turku. During my studies, I have spent a year in Graz, Austria in 2017–2018 and an exchange year at Université Lumière Lyon II in France in 2014–2015.

Teaching

I've lectured in the following courses/projects:

- Sociolinguistics, French
-​​​​​​​ Digital interaction, School of Languages and Translation Studies
- Corpus linguistics and Language Technology, Digital language Studies
- Discourse and Interaction Studies, French
- Tiedetestaajat, Universities of Turku and Jyväskylä, Finnish Cultural Foundation
- Organizing an academic symposium, School of Languages and Translation Studies
- Supplementary course, French

Research

In my research, I focus on communication and interaction during the Covid-19 pandemic from the language use perspective. I'm especially interested in what kind of attitudes and emotions different media actors from news writers to social media users attach to the global health crisis in Finnish digital media. My research has been funded by the Kone Foundation 2023–2027, the C.V. Åkerlund Media Foundation 2022–2023, the Turku University Foundation's Granö research residency grant 2024 and the Utuling Doctoral Programme's travel grants 2023 and 2024.

I'm also a part of the multidisciplinary TurkuNLP language technology team: https://turkunlp.org/.

Other research-related projects I've participated:

- Member of organising committee, Finnish Conference of Linguistics
- Project researcher, Chatbot project, French
- Project researcher, Akasu project, Finnish and Finno-Ugric Languages
- Project worker, Paraphrase project, Data analytics
- Project researcher, RoboLang and Health News projects, French
- Conference secretary, Approaches to Digital Discourse Analysis conference

Publications

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Filosofian tohtoreiden monipuoliset urapolut (2023)

Hiiskuttua: Turun yliopiston humanistisen tiedekunnan verkkolehti
Pajunen Henni, Saarni Jenna, Pinomaa Outi
(Artikkeli ammattilehdessä tai kirjoitus ammatillisessa blogissa (D1))

Textual Paraphrase Dataset for Deep Language Modelling (2022)

Kanerva Jenna, Ginter Filip, Chang Li-Hsin, Skantsi Valtteri, Kilpeläinen Jemina, Kupari Hanna-Mari, Piirto Aurora, Saarni Jenna, Sevón Maija, Tarkka Otto
(Vertaisarvioitu artikkeli kokoomateoksessa (A3))

Finnish Paraphrase Corpus (2021)

Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings
Kanerva Jenna, Ginter Filip, Chang Li-Hsin, Rastas Iiro, Skantsi Valtteri, Kilpeläinen Jemina, Kupari Hanna-Mari, Saarni Jenna, Sevón Maija, Tarkka Otto
(Vertaisarvioitu artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa (A4))