Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Chesnokova N., Wang S., Larsen K. W. et al.

  The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern Korea

  Korea is a historical region of prominence in the global political economy. Still, a comprehensive overview of its early modern era has yet to receive a book-length treatment in English. Comprising topical chapters written by 22 experts from 11 countries, The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern Korea presents an interdisciplinary survey of Korea’s politics, society, economy, and culture from the founding of the Chosŏn state (1392–1897) to 1873 when its political leadership began preparing for treaty relations with Imperial Japan, the United States, and other Western nations.

  Chosŏn mirrors shared historical patterns among literate sedentary societies of early modern Afro-Eurasia. Various long-term developments that shaped early modern Korea include the completion of centralized bureaucratic governance as codified in the State Administrative Code (Kyŏngguk taejŏn); the appearance of regular rural marketplaces facilitating transactions in an increasingly liberalized economy; continuity of an aristocracy (yangban) from the medieval period (Koryŏ: 918–1392); a decreasing correspondence between ascriptive status and socioeconomic class; and the state and the elite’s growing interest in encyclopedic knowledge and its dissemination while their monopoly on knowledge production weakened.

  This handbook provides historical context for readers wishing to know more than just the “Korea” that evokes K-pop or North Korea’s nuclear weapons, while Hyundai, Samsung, and other South Korean brands have gained visibility in everyday life. Interested English-speaking scholars, educators, students, and the general public without access to the large body of Korean-language works on Chosŏn will find this book a valuable critical introduction to early modern Korea.

  Routledge, 2025.

• Article

  Vinogradov A., Korobov M.

  The Goths in Taurica: New Onomastic Evidence

  This paper reopens the question of possible onomastic relics of the Crimean Goths preserved in Byzantine epigraphy of the peninsula. Along with revisiting earlier scholarship, the authors present and discuss several personal names of likely Gothic origin spanning the time from the 4th to the 15th century C.E., and attempt to outline a series of conclusions based on their typology, location, date, and the social position of their bearers in Byzantine Taurica.

  Indogermanischen Forschungen. 2025. Vol. 130. No. 1. P. 7-28.

• Book chapter

  Kazartsev (Evgenii Kazartcev) E., Dmitry Pronin, Kirina M.

  Digital Literary Studies at Work: A Novel Platform "SOCIOLIT" for Computer Modeling of Socio-Literary Dynamics in Russia

  The article presents and discusses the initial results of testing the "SOCIOLIT" platform, developed at the National Research University Higher School of Economics within the Faculty of Humanities. This platform is designed to investigate the impact of literature on society, focusing primarily on Russian literature and the issue of literary centrism in Russian culture across different eras. The "SOCIOLIT" is equipped with various unique large corpora of texts from Russian novels, short stories, in-depth interviews with key figures in the literary process, as well as content from media and Telegram channels. It features modern lexical search mechanisms and digital tools for text processing and comparison. Advanced algorithms for automatic text recognition, processing, and linguistic analysis have been integrated into a specialized search engine. The findings obtained through this platform provide new insights into the relationships among different texts in Russian literature, the influence of specific authors on one another, and the role of literature in shaping public consciousness. Overall, this research significantly enhances our understanding of how literature functions and its importance for the evolution of Russian culture.

  In bk.: 37th Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT. IEEE, 2025.

• Working paper

  Konstantin Zaitsev.

  Exploring the Effectiveness of Methods for Persona Extraction

  The paper presents a study of methods for extracting information about dialogue participants and evaluating their performance in Russian. To train models for this task, the Multi-Session Chat dataset was translated into Russian using multiple translation models, resulting in improved data quality. A metric based on the F-score concept is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the extraction models. The metric uses a trained classifier to identify the dialogue participant to whom the persona belongs. Experiments were conducted on MBart, FRED-T5, Starling-7B, which is based on the Mistral, and Encoder2Encoder models. The results demonstrated that all models exhibited an insufficient level of recall in the persona extraction task. The incorporation of the NCE Loss improved the model's precision at the expense of its recall. Furthermore, increasing the model's size led to enhanced extraction of personas.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024