Russia-Oriented Digital Humanities: Decentralizing Our Field

Although digital humanities (DH) projects enjoy a certain “wow” factor, Russianists often shy away from exploring the possibilities of DH. Traditionally, DH has done great service for archiving and mapping, and now is being used increasingly for analysis. In that way, it is starting to expand and decentralize our field.

Linguists have been using DH methods for decades. As Marijeta Bozovic and others pointed out in a 2021 forum in Russian Literature, there is a strong Slavic intellectual heritage in Formalism and Structuralism that anticipated many uses of DH. More recently, in the last twenty years SEEE-area historians have been developing digital archives and research projects. Online fora such as H-Net have started several East European listservs, among them Ukraine, Romania, Georgia, and Bulgaria (for example, H-Ukraine). Now, some of us in the Slavic literary world are using digital tools to teach literature and explore exciting research questions. The 2023 ASEEES Convention in Philadelphia featured an unusual number of noteworthy, digitally-related projects. They range from innovative approaches to teaching history and culture to making visualization tools for larger data analysis. These ongoing projects are asking important questions and are finding digital pathways that may well enhance our interpretive capabilities. One of the great benefits of DH is the chance to shift research foci, and, in particular, to decentralize our perspectives.

The first spike of interest in Russian-Studies DH came mainly in the form of open-access literary and historical archives. Starting at the turn of the 21st century, full-text collected works of major writers came online. We could filter and search Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoi’s works. Then came more expansive databases like Prozhito, the enormous collection of diaries, starting with Mikhail Prishvin’s brilliant, decades-long diary. In the world of historical mapping, Kelly O’Neill’s Imperiia project (Harvard University) has been online since the late teens.

In the last couple of years, we have been seeing a new spike of both historical and literary activity. Teaching techniques increasingly involve using Voyant, ArcGIS, StoryMaps, and Omeka, among other open-source tools. In research, new results promise to come from text-analysis, mapping, graphing, and other visualization tools, which allow us to extend our research horizons and embrace a much larger volume of material, ask innovative questions, and formulate different kinds of hypothesis. Interpretive results are gradually appearing. While some of these projects pertain to traditional Russian literary hubs of activity—Moscow and St. Petersburg—most decentralize our vision.

Digital humanistic techniques are becoming an important part of the Russian literature classroom in ways that help students perceive the subject matter more broadly. Elena Murenina (East Carolina University) brings DH into her student-centered learning environment by mentoring undergraduate research projects on cross-cultural semiotics. She teaches digital mapping of Pushkin’s and Dostoevsky’s literary spaces. To these ends, she encourages students to use Omeka and ArcGIS Story Maps. She incorporates into her teaching interactive websites, for example, Elizabeth LaFave’s Word as Image in 1820s Imperial Russia and MaKenna Johnston’s City as a Space: Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”.

Two researchers are using computational text analysis to answer interesting literary and historical textual questions, again focused primarily on major texts and St. Petersburg. Digital Dostoevsky, started in 2019 by Kate Holland (University of Toronto) and Katherine Bowers (University of British Columbia), is a computational text analysis project that uses the standards of text markup developed by TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) to encode and conduct research on a corpus of seven Dostoevsky novels (The Double, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, and Brothers Karamazov). Team members encode texts interpretively, identifying and marking the speech, characters, locations, and formal aspects of each novel, as well as elements related to specific research questions. This encoding creates an edition of a text that a computer can parse and extract information from, allowing scholars to examine textual elements in different configurations. TEI is particularly useful for revealing deep structural patterns that would be challenging to identify using methods like close reading. One of the planned outcomes of Digital Dostoevsky is a web resource where scholars can download and use the TEI editions created by the team for their own research. More information about the project and a link to its associated Github repository can be found here.

Some of the research topics that interest the team include the nature of the double in The Double, the fragmented chronology of and gossip in Demons, comparing the confessional voice in Notes from Underground and The Adolescent, and uses of quotation in Brothers Karamazov. In addition, the team is extending the study of the Petersburg Text, asking what the relationship is between location and affect.

Increasingly, DH teaching assignments expand students’ cultural awareness beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg. Barbara Henry (University of Washington) has been involved in building a website on Yiddish theater that is a treasure trove for related courses and research. Tatiana Saburova (Indiana University) uses StoryMap, travelogues, and historical maps to investigate probable routes that explorers took through the Altai Mountains bordering today’s Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia. Susanna Weygandt (Sewanee) has developed a new course introducing digital approaches to literature and history. Her theme is the hot topic of American slavery and Russian serfdom. Weygandt bases her introduction on the 2021 Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies edited by Daria Gritsenko and others. The course draws data from various related American sites, such as Sewanee’s Roberson Project and other universities’ platforms on race and reconciliation. Students learn basic coding to use ArcGIS and employ digital tools, including Omeka, to exhibit their work.

Several compelling research projects deploy DH tools. Andrew Janco (University of Pennsylvania) is working to connect recent innovations in machine learning with humanities research to study large document collections, such as the Prozhito diary archive with over 3,000 diaries. At the 2019 ASEEES Convention, scholars from various disciplines gathered to work with the collection and to explore the potential of a text collection spanning more than 400 years. Phil Gleissner, for example, used named entity recognition to find mentions of journals and articles in the diary entries. Given that many of the journals had common names like “Neva” or “Oktiabr’,” the group trained a model that uses the surrounding text to predict when “Neva” is a river and when it is a journal name in the text. At the 2023 ASEEES Convention, Janco presented ongoing work with the collection to address questions about temporality in the text. While some words indicate when a text was written, most of the 200,000+ diary entries in the collection contain few or no textual clues that would signal time. His paper combined text embeddings of the diary entries with metadata from the collection using an embedding fine-tuning approach pioneered by Vincent Warmerdam. Embeddings are learned numerical representations of the semantic features of a text. Text embeddings are particularly useful because they allow us to use computational methods on unstructured text in ways that preserve the complexity of language. Thus, texts of diary entries are transformed by a large language model into numerical representations of their semantic contents. One can add temporal information to embedding by fine-tuning the entry’s date, if it is known.

Janco then derives a representation of the contents of the entry and a bearing on when it was written. The resulting text embeddings can be clusters to identify significant topics and ideas in the texts. For example, there is a clear cluster of diary entries related to the October Revolution. Embedding fine-tuning makes this cluster more coherent and allows for a clear distinction between diary entries written during the Revolution and those that reflect from a distance on those events. These methods make it possible to ask new questions of large corpora of historical sources and open new methods for historical research.

Aaron M. Thompson’s research (University of Virginia) draws from textual analytics, digital archiving, and learning interfaces for scholars and students of Russian intellectual history. His dissertation project, “A Revolutionary Gospel,” features an online compendium of the relationship between radical politics, literature, and Russian Orthodox culture before the Bolshevik Revolution in a way that expands both intellectual and geographical awareness. With a particular focus on Maxim Gorky’s revolution-era works, Thompson is building an interactive, searchable Synodal Bible that intersects with digital full texts of Gorky’s major stories and novels. Using Python and two interfaces, the computer produces examples of the ways in which Gorky and other politically engaged writers borrowed from the Orthodox tradition to position revolutionary socialism as the worldview to succeed Christianity. The project provides visualized data to explain how Gorky and others “transposed” biblical discourse and rewrote biblical stories and characters for political purposes.

This project also offers a virtual archive of Gorky’s life in Italy during the pre-revolutionary period as he and fellow socialist authors articulated their revolutionary use of religious feeling to inspire Russian readers and transform the Russian state.

Other approaches that are gaining ground and supporting interpretive projects in Russia-focused DH are mapping and map-related graphing that decentralize our awareness of Russia in its various iterations and empires. Historians have done the most digital work for the longest time, so far, although literary research is also producing suggestive results. All of them feed into the strong interest in decolonization and decentralization that is now dominant in Slavic studies. In Philadelphia, Kelly O’Neill presented a new Imperiia project, using GIS, pre-revolutionary maps, and 1890s data from a local botanist to create an approximate map of the pre-revolutionary botanical environment of the Odesa region. This project offers a partial visualization of the biodiversity in this region in the late 19th century. As with many of the digital projects presented at ASEEES, this project draws attention to Ukraine and offers comparative data for any current research focused on environmental change in southern Ukraine.

Susan Grunewald’s research on post-World War II Soviet prisoners of war uses GIS to map the camps where specifically German POWs were incarcerated between 1941 and 1956.

Grunewald’s mapping supports the hypothesis that camps were located strategically to use German POWs for economic reasons, namely to rebuild Soviet infrastructure after the war, and suggests that economic interests in this case predominated over ideological interests. Her findings, as well as many of her GIS maps, can be found in her book, From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (forthcoming July 2024).

Another recent development, this time in literary mapping, is the 2022 publication of Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia, a University of Virginia database of place-related Russian literary works from the 1914-1922 period of war and revolution. Although I spearheaded the project, it was assembled and mounted by a team of Internet architects, web designers, and Russianists. My goal in developing this body of revolution-era literature was twofold: to analyze feelings about geographical place, broadly speaking, across a large range of texts written in a turbulent time and to add greater interpretive capability to the database. The team at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities used Ruby on Rails to construct the database and Leaflet to facilitate mapping. Using XML/TEI, the graduate student team and I tagged (and are continuing to tag) textual images of place for place type and scale, place-related feeling, and political attitude. Two kinds of mapping and graphing tools embedded in the MAPRR site enable individual interrogation and exploration. MAPRR contains maps of hundreds of geographical locations, either mentioned in texts from the war era or related to known composition or publication sites. Graphs show networks of the 90 writers currently in the database and the feelings about place(s) expressed in their texts.

These tools suggest networks and fabrics of perception that open to view more fine-grained topographies of place-based identity across European Russia and Siberia. More about this project and its interpretive results can be found in my online book, Shredding the Map: Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia (forthcoming September, 2024).

Over the last 30 years, digital humanities have proven to be a game-changing asset for database and archive development. Now opportunities are opening for interpretive design that will add important new opportunities and perspectives for Russian and Slavic studies. The time commitment for DH projects is considerable but the payoff in the end will be well worth the effort.

Edith W. Clowes holds the Brown-Forman Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, where she teaches Russian and Czech literature and culture. Her research and teaching interests span literature, philosophy, geography, and utopian thought. She is a past director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas. She is author of Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Cornell, 2011); Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Cornell, 2004); Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton, 1993); The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890-1914 (Northern Illinois, 1988, 2018); and, recently, co-editor of Russia’s Regional Identities: The Power of the Provinces, with G. Erbslöh and A. Kokobobo (Routledge, 2018) and Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, with S. J. Bromberg (Northern Illinois, 2016). She serves on several editorial boards, among them New Area Studies and REGION.