Hello! My name is Haley and I’m a long-time academic scholar turned librarian. I’m interested in the intersections of text and digital technology, and how this thing we’re calling the digital humanities can enrich and expand our understanding of what is possible in terms of humanities research. To that end, I’m going to create a digital edition. I’m going learn how to mark up a text so that a computer can read and analyze it. I’m going to turn a static text into something a bit more dynamic and interactive. And since I can never really leave Slavic Studies behind, I am going to create a digital edition of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories, starting with “The Nose,” and I’m going to use this project to talk about the work of the digital humanities and digital scholarship.

My introduction into DH came while I was a doctoral student in Slavic Languages and Literatures. As much as I love the subject matter, I found myself quickly disillusioned with the field. If academia can be slow to change, Slavic Studies as a whole is notoriously conservative and unyielding. In some ways, doing the work of Slavic Studies feels like being stuck on a rickety old ship embarking ever so slowly on a path already charted. You don’t know how to get off this boat, perhaps even have some vague ideas about hijacking the whole thing, but the ship is so heavy and hard to re-direct. You find yourself channeling Mayakovsky when he and his contemporaries first penned the Futurist Manifesto all those years ago. Maybe there is no steering the ship. You need to jump, but the waters are murky. And you don’t know how to swim—no one taught you how! Meanwhile, you’re watching other graduate students engage with some interesting interdisciplinary research—stuff that’s relevant and meaningful to our contemporary experience—while you are working with outdated tools and the burden of tradition.

This blog and the project for which it was created is my attempt to “swim,” to grapple with not only some interesting tools and approaches, but also with my intellectual and professional future. Inspired by other DH projects such as Digital Dostoevsky, I am going to create a digital edition and document the process here as I go along. Open access, collaboration, and public engagement are core values of the digital humanities, and I will endeavor to make the process of creating this digital edition as transparent and accessible as possible. To that end, I’ll be including helpful resources, tips, and explanatory materials that informed my research and creative process with every post. I hope this might be a place that supports learning and innovative thinking, as well as a forum to connect and share ideas.

We need new perspectives and modes of analysis to breathe life into our approach to Slavic literature and humanistic inquiry in general. These kinds of tools and methods are not meant to displace traditional modes of inquiry and research, but to complement and challenge tired assumptions of what it means to extract meaning from a text. The digital humanities may be able to help change how we conduct and support humanities research, BUT there’s still a lot of work to be done. While I cannot yet speculate on exactly how this particular project will turn out or what research questions will be answered, I do hope to learn a lot about how DH and Slavic Studies intersect. I also hope that this may serve as a useful guide for someone out there (maybe even you) looking to start their own DH project.