We’re back! Actually we didn’t go anywhere and the project has been progressing well in the last couple of years although we’ve clearly been failing to update the blog. I’m writing this entry overlooking the Strait of Georgia from Katia’s office on the stunning UBC campus after doing our first in-person Digital Humanities Summer Institute (which we were supposed to do in June 2020, but then the pandemic struck…) Katia, Braxton, Lena and I have spent June of the last few years doing virtual workshops at the DHSI and elsewhere on TEI encoding, Python, XPath, XSLT, XQuery, Network Analysis, Data Mapping and other topics, and it was great to finally get together on the UVic campus on gorgeous Vancouver Island and think about where Digital Dostoevsky is heading next. 

Since the last blog entry, we have completed encoding quite a few of our texts and have discussed many of the minutiae of Dostoevsky’s novels and how to encode them. Thanks to Braxton and Nadia for spending the summer of 2022 doing a first encoding of The Brothers Karamazov and doing a second pass during 2023. Completing The Brothers Karamazov involved much discussion of different groups of monks as well as many layers of speech and quotation, but we’ve now done two encoding passes and Braxton has started his own project on quotation in that novel. Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment were also finished and are now undergoing a second pass at tagging. Thanks to Eden Zorne who has now gone on to an MA at the University of Illinois but did a first pass at both of those novels, providing a good basis for an imminent attempt to tag the whole of our corpus to investigate the Dostoevskian fictional landscape and how it maps onto the classic “Petersburg text.” Along the way we also did a preliminary network analysis which, to nobody’s surprise, proved that the underground man has more interactions with himself and characters who are part of his own imaginary universe than he does with any of the characters that participate in the second part of the novella. Dmytro has made a valiant attempt at a first pass at The Idiot, and the encoding is now being checked by our superhero Veronika, who has completed a first pass of the infamously complicated late novel The Adolescent, and who spots typos and encoding problems like an eagle spots its unfortunate earth-bound prey! We’ve welcomed two new encoders to the project, Liza and Sydney. Liza is learning the ropes with Stavrogin’s Confession, the unpublished section of Demons, while Sydney is helping Veronika do a second pass at The Idiot. Meanwhile Lena has been working on a second-round encoding of Demons, which she’s also using for an individual project on gossip in that novel, which promises to be a fascinating addition to the scholarship.   

Katia and I have been working on our first significant research output, which is about how computational text analysis can help us to examine questions of liminality in The Double. Since October 2022, when we did our first project presentation on multilingual Digital Humanities with the accomplished Quinn Dombrowski as our chair in Toronto for the first annual conference of the Critical Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, we’ve been presenting our work in several fora and conferences. In January 2023 we presented at a Slavic DH workshop together with our Dogopedia colleagues hosted online by Princeton Center for the Digital Humanities, in March 2023 the Toronto team gave a presentation to our local colleagues as part of the U of T Slavic Colloquium, and in November 2023 we gave our first Slavic talk at the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies conference to a lively crowd, which helped Katia and I to rethink our argument about The Double. We’re now about to give an updated panel presentation at the Canadian Association of Slavists conference in Montreal as part of the Canadian Congress of Arts and Humanities, and we’ll also be giving another update at the ASEEES conference in November in Boston. 

Things are moving fast and furiously with the project and so expect more updates soon.