HSE Centre for Digital Humanities

On October 3, the School of History and the HSE Centre for Digital Humanities, with support from the Teaching Excellence Initiative, held a lecture by Dr. Andrew Janco (Haverford College, USA) entitled ‘Engaging Students in the Humanities and Sciences through Digital Scholarship Projects.’ Covering methods for engaging students in project-based research in the digital humanities, the lecture aimed to demonstrate the benefits of researchers working with students as co-investigators with their own research interests and agenda.

These days, no scientific research is carried out without the use of digital media for the production or dissemination of knowledge. The term ‘Digital Humanities’ reflects this process and constitutes a scientific field where humanists not only aim to use a certain software, but also to understand research using quantitative semantics. However, digital infrastructures are not the same globally. In her talk at the HSE April International Academic Conference Dr Gimena del Rio Riande addressed various issues that arise in connection with digital humanities.

The Easy Linavis web-service allows users to quickly transform a text or any other type of data into a graph, as well as study it by using a social network analysis. You don’t need any special programming skills to use this service.

Alberto Acerbi, a cognitive/evolutionary anthropologist at TU Eindhoven, explains the notion of cultural evolution and highlights its potential for Digital Humanities.

The HSE Centre for Digital Humanities jointly with the School of linguistics and the School of history held the Digital Humanities week. Among the participants were the "Memorial" society, the "Prozhito" project, the Open List, the Centre for Digital Humanities at Perm University, the German Historical Institute Moscow, as well as researchers from various HSE schools and departments.

Frank Fisher, Associate Professor in the School of Linguistics, moved to HSE in 2016, having previously worked at Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities. Since then he has helped found HSE's own Centre for Digital Humanities, participated in a summer school on digital literary research, started a junior research group and became a co-director of DARIAH, a pan-European research infrastructure. In the interview Frank talks about the benefits of being a researcher at HSE and describes his own research activities and plans.

Three new novels are now available on the Living Pages app library: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin, and The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. The app was developed by the HSE School of Linguistics together with Samsung and experts from Tolstoy Digital group.

On November 23-25 a research seminar on literary studies ‘Etats des Etudes Litteraires: Theories, Methodologies, Pratiques’ was held in Lausanne, Switzerland. Anastasiya Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Associate Professor at the School of Linguistics presented a report on Tolstoy.Digital – a project dedicated to producing a digital edition of the complete works by Leo Tolstoy.

Today computer and corpora technologies play an important role in language studies and language learning along with traditional methods of analysis. New corpora resources and software for language analysis are regularly developed. Experts from Russia, CIS and other countries discussed the latest achievements in this field at the international conference ‘Corpus Technologies, Digital Humanities and Modern Research’.

The Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, one of the oldest universities in Germany, hosted a three-day workshop on social network analysis of literary texts conducted by Daniil Skorinkin, Lecturer at the School of Linguistics, and Frank Fischer, Associate Professor at the School.