Join us on October 20 at 9:30 am for the virtual Sawchen Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Daniil Skorinkin and Dr. Alexey Vdovin of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The talk is co-sponsored by the SSHRC-funded Digital Dostoevsky project at University of Toronto. The project’s PI, Kate Holland (University of Toronto), will moderate.
View the recording of this talk here:
Title: “Russian Digital Humanities: Spotlight on Russian Drama and Novels Corpora”
Abstract: A Data-Driven View on 200 Years of Russian Drama
Daniil Skorinkin will present RusDraCor (rus.dracor.org) — an open corpus of Russian drama intended for digital literary studies. As of today, the corpus contains 210 Russian plays from 1747 to 1947. RusDraCor is part of the bigger DraCor family of corpora (dracor.org) — an international endeavor for quantitative research of dramatic texts. All the DraCor texts are encoded in the machine-readable XML-based format known as TEI, widely used in building corpora for the humanities. Skorinkin will demonstrate how such encoding and the digital methods we apply could bring new knowledge about the evolution of Russian drama over 200 years. If time allows, Skorinkin will also offer ‘structural insights’ into particular well-known Russian plays.
Towards the Corpus of the Russian Novel, 1800-1917
Alexey Vdovin will present the first database of Russian Novels, 1800-1917, which now contains 1500 texts and becomes the basis of the future corpus in progress. In his talk, Alexey will describe the sources of the database, its scope and limits, its metadata, and the principles and the difficulties of categorization of novels. The database in its current view allows to pose several simple questions leading to the fundamental turning points in the history of the Russian novel.
Bios: Daniil Skorinkin is the head of the Masters’ program in Digital Humanities at the HSE University in Moscow. His main area of interest is digital literary studies with a focus on computational methods for modeling ‘character spaces’ and ‘character systems’ in fiction. His PhD thesis was a digital take on the character system in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which involved network analysis, stylometry, and certain NLP techniques. Daniil is the co-founder & one of the main contributors of rus.dracor.org.
Alexey Vdovin is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Faculty of Humanities, Moscow). He is the author of Nikolai Dobroliubov: raznochinets mezhdu dukhom i plot’iu (Moscow, 2017), Kontsept glava literatury v russkoi kritike 1830–1860 (Tartu, 2011) and co-editor of Khrestomatiinye teksty: Russkaia ped- agogicheskaia praktika i literaturnyi kanon XIX veka (Tartu, 2013). His fields of expertise are the history of Russian literature in the Age of Realism, Russian literary criticism, theory of literary canon, history of Russian novel. His current projects are the corpus of Russian novel, 1800-1917, and the book entitled ‘To Kill the Idyll: the Stories about Peasants in the Russian Culture Before Emancipation”.
