A lot has happened since the three years that I last posted on The Digital Gogol Project. I was hired in my first role as a librarian at a community college. I gave birth to my third child. I learned new skills. I published a few articles. I helped re-launch a small, independent book press. I watched the world change dramatically. Life happened. 

I always intended to come back to this blog (at least I tell myself that). And yet, I did keep paying the yearly subscription fee for WordPress. There just never seemed to be enough time, mental space, money for training opportunities, or motivation. I also worried that I didn’t really know what I was doing in the first place.

And then I got my first full-time librarian job. In January of 2026, I became the humanities librarian at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. I’m an assistant professor and subject specialist for history, modern languages and literatures, and the Honors College. I’ve been there for six months, and it’s been wonderful. Suddenly, all the extra “stuff” I did in my free time – specifically the digital humanities stuff – is now part of my job. 

And here’s where it gets interesting.

A few months into my new role as humanities librarian, I was in a scholarship meeting with several of my peers. These meetings are opportunities for the newer library faculty to discuss what they’re working on, pose ideas and questions, and collaborate in a casual setting. Although I have established myself as a scholar of Chornobyl and the Soviet nuclear legacy (something that has since evolved to include the environmental violence of the Russian war in Ukraine), I have yet to figure out what my librarian scholarship should focus on. 

In one of those meetings, fueled by a need to talk about a “cool” idea and maybe gauge reactions as to taking this scholarly direction, I told everyone in that meeting that I was thinking about returning to a previous project. This project. Everyone reacted positively to my idea, even though internally I was already worrying about how I would even re-start something that I hadn’t even looked at for three years. For the most part, I avoided thinking about The Digital Gogol Project, because it represented failure, something that started with so much enthusiasm but fizzled out before it even really got going.

After that scholarship meeting, I figured I would think about reviving this project for a couple of months before getting distracted by something else. While I still thought it was a cool idea, it’s a big project with the potential for overwhelm. The next morning, however, I woke up to an email from a student at Middlebury. She could read Russian and loved Nikolai Gogol’s stories. She had seen my blog and wondered if it was still active. If it was, she wanted to help out over the summer. 

Serendipity? A blessing? Unbelievable luck? Whatever it was, I took it as a sign from the universe that I needed to revive The Digital Gogol Project. And that is just what we (I along with my collaborator Amara) are doing. This project started off as a means of exploring the digital humanities, and that will still be its focus. We will be exploring Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, a collection of short stories written between 1835-1842 set in the capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg. We will be encoding every text and using computational methods to bring them to life in new ways. We will be documenting both the technical process and our personal experiences, as well as Gogol’s life and the historical context of his writing. We will be thinking about Gogol’s status in the Russian literary canon and his Ukrainian heritage in the shadow of Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine. We will be experimenting with new technologies and learning new skills. We will become digital humanists (maybe we already are).