Welcome! My name is Haley and this is my blog, where I’m going to learn how to mark up a text so that a computer can read and analyze it. I’m interested in the intersections of texts 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.
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 a bit disillusioned with the field. If academia can be slow to change, Slavic Studies as a whole is notoriously conservative and unyielding. I found myself channeling Mayakovsky when he and his contemporaries first penned the Futurist Manifesto and wanted to jettison the Russian literary canon from the ship of modernity all those years ago. 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, and perhaps even have some vague ideas about hijacking the whole thing, but the ship is massive and hard to re-direct. 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research—stuff that’s relevant and meaningful to our contemporary experience—while you are working with outdated tools under the burden of tradition. It’s time for something new.
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 (https://digitaldostoevsky.com), I am going to create a digital edition and document the process here as I go along. To that end, I’ll be including helpful resources, tips, and explanatory materials that informed my research and creative process. I hope this might be a place that supports learning and innovative thinking, as well as a forum to connect and share ideas. The focus on open access, collaboration, public engagement, and transparency are important values in the digital humanities, which is why the work I do in this blog is intended to teach and foster important discussions about both Slavic Studies and the digital humanities.
I am going to create a digital edition of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories, starting with “The Nose.” 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 traditional 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.
Latest
Gogol and Identity: Past and Present
Amara Romero When I was first assigned a short story by Nikolai Gogol in my intro class on the Golden Age of Russian literature, I expected him to feel distant. Often hailed as the “father of Russian realism”, Gogol’s work, like any writer’s, is of course a reflection of his time. I anticipated tales of…
A Re-introduction of Sorts…
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.…
Text as Data?
The digital humanities has expanded the possibilities of textual and literary studies. For this first stage of the project, I am interested in producing a digital scholarly edition, which involves manually annotating a text following the TEI standard, a practice for representing texts digitally; doing so will essentially turn the text into data. This pursuit…
The Digital Gogol Project 