We will gather material to facilitate the teaching and research of post-Soviet media culture from Gorbachev’s glasnost’ to Putin’s election in 2000. You can find more about the project at our Sourcebook site or postsoviet90s.com.

This panel explores current trends in the quantitative study of verse and poetics. Panelists will present research projects dealing with the computer-based analysis of large text corpora and with the nature of verse from the perspective of digital media. In particular the focus will be on (1) possibilities of the use of formal verse features for the authorship attribution problem, (2) meter as the normative structure in poetry, and (3) the problem of visualization of the verse form (e.g. meter and rhyme).

This session will explore different aspects of Digital Humanities and their impact on Russian and Soviet history. It presents GIS mapping and online archives to illustrate both the challenges and the benefits of bringing digital methods to historical practices. Two of the presenters use GIS mapping to not only to visualize, but also to further arguments about politics and economics. One presenter explores different types of digital archiving as a means of both preserving and disseminating historical information and research.

This roundtable will address the stages of creating a Slavic studies digital humanities (DH) project and the challenges of working with the sources and project audiences. The participants will talk about the process of creating their DH projects from conception to completion. The projects presented include digital archives of documents and photographs, GIS mapping, and textual analysis and grammatical visualization. The roundtable will allow us to showcase a variety of projects, methods, and tools, as well as resources available to scholars at all stages of their career.

Sound recordings are a powerful testament to the past, but the archives discourse often overlooks the medium in favor of documentary and visual materials. This seminar presents case studies that explore the unique challenges of creating, collecting, preserving, and enabling access to audio recordings in analog and digital archival contexts. In Roundtable I, presenters will address such topics as solutions for fast and accurate transcription, issues of description and digitization, the logistical challenges posed by such media as reel-to-reel recordings and audiotapes, and the ethical considerations involved in archiving field research recordings. Roundtable II will focus on digital and web archives, including online archives of Soviet-era rock music, the performances of Vladimir Vysotsky, the sound cultures of Ukrainian and Russian diasporic communities in the US and Canada, and a web archive preserving the dialect of the Czech community in Texas.

As a “professional development” panel, presenters and the audience will look beyond reporting on projects underway (though this will be part of our discussions) to also think strategically about “Digital Humanities” in relation to our profession–both in the conventional sense of “professional development” as of how we develop our own skills and knowledge and that of our students but also the development of the field. This is meant to interest people not involved in DH as well as active leaders and practitioners.

This roundtable will focus on recently-available archival resources that permit new research on organization and performance of communications between Western countries and the Soviet orbit during the Cold War. The Iron Curtain was importantly also an Information Curtain. East-West communications were an important aspect of the Cold War competition and are of contemporary relevance in a media landscape where every outlet is in a battle for legitimacy against charges of misinformation. Cold War communications archival resources include institutional records, recorded sound, oral histories, secret police archives from the Soviet bloc, and declassified Western government documents. Access varies widely, as some archives have been digitized and curated for complex search and discovery, while others are widely scattered in a Cold War archive archipelago. This roundtable will include archivists, scholars, and digital humanists who will discuss what is at stake during the process of digitization and data analysis, as well as address research strategies for exploiting other widely scattered resources.

In blurring the distinction between media producers and consumers, and formal and informal content, the contemporary global media ecology gives rise to new models of information circulation and online identity construction. This panel interrogates the potential for identity reconstruction within the framework of the media event. The papers included provide a comprehensive examination of different Russian media actors’ responses to the transformative potential of the media event – ranging from broadcast content to social media platforms. The cases under consideration include: state-linked media actors’ performances of history and pedagogy for online commemorative centennial projects; how RT’s staff of international journalists perform multiple on- and offline identities in their audience interactions; and the role of election campaign performances and their media coverage on Ksenia Sobchak’s balancing of contradictory public personae. Together, these papers give a comprehensive overview not only of how actors employ media events to performatively rebrand their own identities, but also of the ways in which media agents balance these multiple personae to navigate the structural constraints of the media environments in which they operate.