Digital Publications: Present and Future

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Anastasiya Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Associate Professor at the School of Linguistics and Head of the Master’s in Digital Humanities, took part in the first webinar of the UniverCities and Culture series held by the University Network of European Capitals of Culture and the Network of Universities from the Capitals of Europe (UNICA) on November 17. She spoke about The Digital Tolstoy Initiative, a joint effort by linguists, philologists, and programmers to develop a digital 'semantic' edition of Leo Tolstoy's complete works. In her interview, Dr Bonch-Osmolovskaya talks about the initiative and other digital humanities projects at HSE University.

Anastasiya Bonch-Osmolovskaya

The very fact that the meetings are happening is very important to the development of digital humanities. It’s a field that was born from the ground up, starting with local interdisciplinary projects where scholars of the humanities worked with database engineers and the developers of data analysis computer algorithms.

That’s why joining forces at the international level, globalization and sharing experience are particularly important: we can transition from solving specific tasks in specific circumstances to adopting a wider vision on approaches, standards, and possibilities

We currently have several projects related to digital publications underway. First, this year, a student project to create a digital edition of the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski was completed with support from the academic fund of the Faculty of Humanities. This is a very important journal for the history of Russian culture in the 19^th century. So far, around only 10% of the total amount of material is ready for the digital publication, but that’s a huge amount of work and we’re going to continue it.

This year, work began in the mirror lab with Southern Federal University, where we work with our colleagues in Rostov-on-Don to prepare a digital edition of the complete works of Chekhov. It’s also important to note that we’re currently working with collections that previously had physical releases.

I hope that soon, our editions will be ‘born digital,’ existing only in digital form with all the opportunities that provides

The Digital Tolstoy

My colleagues and I have been working on the Digital Tolstoy project for several years. Our goal is to take the complete 90-volume works of Tolstoy (a rare edition) and create an electronic database with advanced document search functions, translations from old orthography to the modern style, and an index of names and dates.

When we started the project, we thought that if we wanted to learn to create digital academic publications, then a 90-volume collection was the best way to do it. The idea of a digital publication is that any part of the text can have a series of layers—the text itself and interpretations of it. All of this collected information and knowledge help everyone understand the text better. In digital form, there can be any number of interpretations; we aren’t limited by a book format and can keep adding and expanding its capabilities to include sources, history and reading.

I like the analogy that if books are two dimensional, then a digital publication adds a new dimension—although it turns out that adding this dimension is no easy task.

Books have their own logic (for example, in how indexes are put together), and this logic doesn’t automatically translate to digital formats. We currently have a working prototype: search.tolstoy.ru. But it really is just a prototype. This autumn, we and the Rodnoe Slovo scientific and education union won a grant from the Foundation for Cultural Initiatives. We are now able to finally complete the project, implementing everything we wanted to and more.

Wide Range of Projects

There are several projects that we’ve just started that are more related to digital publications specifically and the development of digital humanities in Russia in general. One of them is a project aimed at creating a high-quality model for identifying pre-revolution orthography, which is a bottleneck that significantly slows down the digitalization of the humanities. Existing models work so poorly and produce so many errors that they must be corrected manually, which makes the digitization of pre-revolutionary sources an incredibly long process. We saw this while overseeing the student project on Otechestvennye Zapiski. The project was organized under the leadership of Boris Orekhov as part of a large grant won by the HSE University team recently to create an AI research centre.

We also have a whole group of projects devoted to the creation of digital annotations. This is the first step in creating ‘born-digital’ publications. We are working with the Gorky Institute of World Literature, which received a grant to create digital annotations for the comedies of Aristophanes. The annotations will be aimed at specialists.

We are also working on a project by Evgenya Abelyuk to create digital annotations to Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog as part of a big project in Literature and Sociocultural Practices. The aim is to create general annotations primarily aimed at a wide audience—including school students, who can have difficulty understanding the language and realities of the early 20^th century. The general nature of the annotations lies in the fact that they can be applied to other works. This is a never-ending process of accumulation and usage, which is what makes digital annotations and publications so great.