Research & Expertise

On October 2, 2020, Poletayev Readings 9¾ took place – annual conference of the Poletayev Institute for Humanitarian Historical and Theoretical Studies. We present a report by Elizaveta Lysenko, Alexander Mikhailovsky, and Ksenia Belik, and video recordings of the round table discussions.

Daria Khlevnyuk, a postdoc fellow of the Institute and a co-founder of the PoSoCoMeS, took an active part in the conference's organization. The conference was attended by researchers of the Institute, Alisa Maksimova and Boris Stepanov.

The Poletaev Readings, dedicated to the memory of Andrey Poletaev, one of the founders of the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (Russian acronym — IGITI), is a major annual event of the Institute. The event was set to mark its 10^th anniversary in 2020, but due to the pandemic, the anniversary forum has been postponed to 2021. In its place, the organizers have arranged the Poletaev Readings 9¾, which were held online. HSE News Service spoke with the event organizer and some of the participants.

This fall the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory will organize a free online course on the East Caucasian (alias Nakh-Daghestanian) language family. The course will start on October 14.

What role has objectivity played in the history of science and what role does it play today? How are innovations in science possible? What is the interrelation between research practices, epistemic virtues, and the scientific self? How are epistemic virtues affected by relations of science and the public, the state, the funders, the industry, media, etc.? Alex Pleshkov and Jan Surman discuss these and many other questions with Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, the authors of "Objectivity," one of the most important books of the 21st century in the field of the history of knowledge. The talk is available as video and as text.

IGITI Research Assistant Olga Vinogradova made a presentation within the framework of an international seminar on Progress and Innovative Ecosystems at the Catholic University of Lille (France).

Any student or 2020 graduate of a Russian or international university is eligible to take part in the Student Research Paper Competition. Papers can be submitted from September 1 to October 15. The competition has been held at HSE University since 2003.

The Russian Ministry of Education and Science has announced the results of a grant competition for big research projects. One of the winners is a project with HSE University participation: the creation of a next generation computational linguistic platform to digitally record the Russian language.

Until four years ago there was no simple tool for linguists to mark a set of points on a map with different colors. A point corresponded to a language, and its color corresponded to a linguistic feature of the language. This inspired George Moroz, of HSE’s Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and School of Linguistics, to create a new software product that turned out to be very popular: lingtypology.

The coronavirus pandemic is transforming modern society, reviving old social practices and formulas such as the Russian ‘flat-car-dacha’ principle, while opening new technological frontiers and creating new cultural skills. Professor Vitaly Kurennoy, Head of HSE’s School of Cultural Studies, discusses these issues in an op-ed for Izvestiia. Read the full translation of the article below.