A Slavic and East European Blog Series on the Practices and Theories of Digital Methods As digital humanities enters the academic mainstream, scholars have become interested in the epistemological, ethical, ideological, and political dimensions of its contributions to literary and cultural studies. Often missing in these conversations, however, are the voices of the practitioners of […]

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I love using Open Refine for my data cleaning. For my project Soviet Journals Reconnected, I wanted to add transliterated names to my database. Transliterating by hand is out of question. For a while, I used a somewhat inconvenient Python script I had come up with. But even for […]

After a year of intensive work on my digital humanities project, it’s time to branch out. This is what I really love about digital humanities: it allows me to present my scholarship with greater immediacy than a journal article can provide – although I currently have an essay about the project under review and writing […]

Setting up a functioning MySQL database on your computer can be a bit of a struggle, although it doesn’t have to be – as I learned the hard way. As a digital humanist, I wanted to do everything “properly:” according to the best practices of my institutional environment. At the same time, things got a […]

This blog post documents how I compiled the dataset for my dh project about the periodicals of the Russian emigration in the 1970s and 1980s. This post provides a detailed discussion of the methods and principles which guided the process of compiling and editing the data that I used for my article “Soviet Union on […]