Saturday, November 23, 2019
Slavic Digital Humanities – DH Workshop
Prozhito Project: ego -text, -location, -networks
Sat, November 23, 8:30 to 11:40am
San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 2, Foothill G1, G2
This year we recruited the founders and leaders of Prozhito (prozhito.org) project to showcase their project outside Russia. Prozhito is a digital repository of Russian- and Ukrainian-language diaries that now comprises over 3000 diaries and over 300,000 daily entries. An important project that collected the hitherto unknown and unpublished diaries, Prozhito is still fairly little known to the US and European researchers. The pre-conference event will explore the ways Prozhito can promote greater access to diaries preserved in the North American repositories. We also convene a roundtable with the pre-conference participants to discuss the service Prozhito and digital humanists associated with it can do to the researchers in the field
Digital Humanities Pedagogy: How to Incorporate DH Tools and Resources in the Classroom
Sat, November 23, 12:00 to 1:45 pm
San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 2, Foothill F
While faculty often see the digital humanities (DH) as “add-ons” to traditional texts and other course materials, DH tools and resources offer tremendous potential to transform the learning experience by supporting open and collaborative learning. This roundtable will show how digital humanities in the Slavic field can be used to cultivate learning communities that extend beyond the walls of the traditional classroom and are critically engaged with issues of accessibility and social justice. As examples, we will discuss concepts such as data sources and management, blogging, and open pedagogies. We will specifically devote time to the web annotation tool Hypothes.is and multi-media resources such as Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, the British National Library’s digital collections, Russian Perspectives on Islam, the University of Washington’s special collection of Russian children’s books, and the Imperiia GIS mapping and data visualization study of the Russian Empire, part of the “Forest to Fleet” project. We welcome both novices and experts in DH to attend the session in hopes of fostering a lively discussion.
Digital Migrations: Diasporas, Transnational Circulations, and Border Crossings through the Lens of Digital Humanities
Sat, November 23, 2:00 to 3:45pm,
San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 2, Foothill F
Migration and global mobility as we know them today are barely thinkable without the Digital Revolution of the late 20th century. While the political and especially economic impacts of globalization in the digital era have been subject to public attention and substantial research, cultural mobility and its entanglement with the virtual realm can benefit from a more thorough conceptualization. At the same time, research in cultural and literary studies increasingly relies on digital methods, which generate new kinds of multi-directional border crossings between analogue and digital that parallel the transnational mobility of texts, ideas, cultural practices, and communities. Conceived around the idea of digital migrations as an abstract and multi-layered concept, this roundtable brings together practitioners of digital humanities, librarians, and scholars of emigre literature and diasporic cultural communities. Our discussion will integrate approaches to the circulation of texts, concepts, archives, data, and communities across a variety of borders: geographical ones, as well as borders between media, technical platforms, data formats, and across the digital-analogue divide. How do these flows impact the success of archival preservation and facilitate access? How do they contribute to processes of local and global meaning making? And how do digital refractions of cultural forms alter our understanding of cultural spaces – of home and abroad, East and West, exile and metropolis?
Digital Russia Studies: Defining an Emergent Field
Sat, November 23, 4:00 to 5:45pm,
San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 2, Foothill F
The ‘digital’ is profoundly changing Russia today, yet it is equally transforming the methods we use to study Russia. To grasp this two-fold transformation – of both research object and research practices – this roundtable brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to lead the way in defining the emerging field of Digital Russia Studies. The roundtable will, first, provide a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy and culture are reconfigured in the context of digitalization, datafication, and the – by now – widespread use of algorithmic systems. For researchers investigating Russia, digitalisation and datafication have resulted in the emergence of a wealth of new (big) data sources, such as social media and various other kinds of ‘digital-born’ content, that allow us to investigate Russian society in novel ways. The accelerating speed at which Russian archives are being digitized means that important collections of research materials have become more easily available. What new research questions emerge and what future directions for research are made possible by these shifts? Second, the round table will showcase examples of the cutting-edge application of computational research methods and reflect on the manifold opportunities for applying them to the study of Russian society, politics and culture. The roundtable is organised by the Digital Russia Studies initiative at the University of Helsinki.
ASEEES Digital Humanities Group Business Meeting
Sat, November 23, 6:00 to 7:30pm,
San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 2, Foothill E
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Methodology as Community: Fostering DH Collaborations in the Slavic and East European Fields
Sun, November 24, 8:00 to 9:45 am,
San Francisco Marriott Marquis, B2, Willow
The emergence of digital humanities tools and methodologies has provided an opportunity for rethinking the collaborative landscape for Slavic and East European studies. Much as in the humanities as a whole, the percentage of scholars in the field actively using digital tools and methodologies is fairly small. For Slavic and East European studies, however, any effort to develop a community around digital humanities is compounded by the comparatively small overall size of the field. While the establishment of the ASEEES Digital Humanities In the Slavic Fields Interest Group has been significant in engendering connections between DH-curious Slavists from different disciplines, some scholars are seeing the advantage of DH collaboration outside existing scholarly organizational frameworks. This panel brings together scholars who have implemented or participated in international collaboration to further their engagement with digital tools and methodologies. They include Slavists and East Europeanists from the United States, Eastern and Western Europe, whose research, teaching, and infrastructure development is shaped by engagement with colleagues who share similar materials and methods despite widely varying national and institutional contexts. In addition to presenting highlights of their own work at the intersections of DH and Eastern European studies, panel participants will reflect on the ways in which digital humanities provides a different organizing principle for their scholarly networks and community.
Teaching with Digital Humanities: Primary Sources, Methods of Analysis, and Real-World Applications
Sun, November 24, 10:00 to 11:45am,
San Francisco Marriott Marquis, B2, Willow
Affiliate Organization: ASEEES Digital Humanities Group
This roundtable is a follow-up to the Slavic DH group pre-conference workshop that will focus on the Prozhito (Prozhito.org) diary archival project. The roundtable will feature Prozhito founder Misha Melnichenko and the DH literature and history scholars from Russia and the US. The roundtable presenters will talk about their experience of bringing privately held, archived, and published diaries to a wide audience of students, volunteer transcribers, and the interested public and using digital humanities methods in teaching and analyzing diaries. Benjamin Sawyer, a host of the popular podcast and blog “The Road to Now” (http://www.theroadtonow.com/) will chair the panel and record interviews with the participants and the public for his website. Misha Melnichenko will present the history of Prozhito as an archival project and talk about Prozhito-led volunteer diary study and transcribing workshops in Russia. Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Academic Supervisor of the Moscow Higher School of Economics (HSE) Computational Linguistics program, will talk about student practicums HSE has been holding in association with Prozhito in Moscow and the experience of introducing students to transcribing and presenting diaries online. Kelly O’Neill, Harvard University Imperiia Project director, will talk about using digital spatial analysis in teaching and the use of digital methodologies to analyze diaries.
Mon, November 25
Computational Poetics
Mon, November 25, 1:45 to 3:30pm
San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Floor: 5, Sierra G
This panel focuses on the use of computational methods to explore formal features of poetry, including meter, rhyme, authorship (and forgery), and the relationship of digital digital libraries, parallel corpora, and the semantic web.