Modeling Data vs Modeling Processes: How Digital Humanities developed in Russia

Much of the Information Studies in the twentieth century was about developing classifications and standards such as library classifications, several iconographic systems for art history images, museum documentation standards, TEI as a standard for classifying and identifying phenomena in texts for electronic publishing. This resulted in building rigorous and sophisticated data models for collections of texts and images. This, in its turn, contributed to developing scholarly digital editions, such as Van Gogh Letters or In Mozart’s Words, a digital edition of Mozart’s correspondence.

When we speak about the history and context of Digital Humanities we tend to speak of Father Roberto Busa and his work on data modeling for Index Thomisticus (see for example, Jones, 2014, Terras and Nyhan, 2016, Fiormonte, 2017). However, much of the work building the ground for digital humanities was done in pre-machine period. Early in the twentieth century, Russian literary scholars developed an approach that ‘perceived literature as a structure, a system of proportions and relations between properties’ (Jarkho, 2006). Russian Formalism, as the approach was later called in Western literary studies, contributed to developing structuralism with its sets of properties and relations for studying a cultural object. Such properties can be used to develop data models and classifications or they can be used to study the dynamics and evolution of a cultural object. The lecture shows that much in Russian Digital Humanities in the twentieth century was about modeling dynamics and change in patterns surrounding cultural objects. This happened because Digital Humanities in Russia were influenced by mathematics, (evolutionary) biology and systems approaches. We suggest that a deeper look into the change of structures, variation and feedback, similar to the approaches of theoretical ecology can be a useful contribution that Russian Digital Humanities can bring to the community. This alternative history will help us to bridge the differences between traditions and disciplines (Kizhner et al, forthcoming).

References

Fiormonte, Domenico. ‘The Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden’. Media Development 64, no. 2, pp. 29-33.

Jarkho, Boris, Research Methods for Literary Studies (ed. Maxim Shapir), Moscow: Pholologica, 2006. In Russian.

Jones, Steven E. Roberto Busa, S.J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards.  New York: Routledge, 2016.

Kizhner, Inna, Melissa Terras, Lev Manovich, Boris Orekhov, Igor Kim, Maxim Rumyantsev, Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya. "The History and Context of Digital Humanities in Russia". In Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and Paola Rikaurte (eds) Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, forthcoming.

Terras, Melissa and Julianne Nyhan. ‘Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives’. In Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/57