Computational Criticism of Russian Literature

The Computational Criticism of Russian Literature Research Unit (Russian NLP for short) convenes monthly virtual meetings of scholars throughout North America and Europe who are using computational methods for their analysis of literary texts. These meetings include a presentation by one of the participants about their current work, Q&A from the audience, and an open discussion where participants can discuss technical and methodological challenges. A blog and mailing list serve as platforms for continuing this dialogue between meetings.

This year, the Russian NLP group will work on adapting the BookNLP natural language processing pipeline developed by David Bamman (UC-Berkeley School of Information) for use with Russian-language text. Some of this work will be done at a Russian DH hackathon to be held at Stanford on Valentine's Day 2020, where David Bamman will be in attendance. The resulting RussianBookNLP code will be made freely available as an open source tool, along with step-by-step tutorials for doing Russian natural language processing aimed at scholars with minimal prior technical knowledge.