Seminar: ASEEES Slavic DH Workshop

Event Date: December 1, 2021

The ASEEES Conference Slavic DH Workshop will be taking place on Zoom on December 1, 2021. This year, the workshop will focus on computational periodical studies, including the materials and questions posed by the interinstitutional DH project, “The Pages of Early Soviet Performance.”https://cdh.princeton.edu/…/pages-early-soviet…/ The “Pages of Early Soviet Performance (PESP)” uses machine learning to generate multiple datasets of early-Soviet illustrated periodicals related to the performing arts. By using computer vision techniques and training a YOLO (You Only Look Once) real-time object detection model, this project generates textual and image data that will facilitate new avenues of research about Soviet culture during the first decades after the October Revolution (1917-1932). All registered participants of ASEEES are welcome to join this hands-on, three-part workshop, focused on the digitization of Russian/Slavic periodicals. Each session is self-contained and can be attended “a la carte.” Participation in all sessions is not required. CALL FOR PANELISTS: Do you use periodical collections in your teaching? Are you a student who has used digital periodical collections in your research or in a classroom setting? We are also seeking interested participants and presenters for our second session dedicated to teaching and learning with periodicals. Please contact Kat Hill Reischl (kmhill@stanford.edu) or Andrew Janco (ajanco@haverford.edu) for questions or to join the panel.

SCHEDULE OVERVIEW: December 1, 2021 (all times US Central, GMT-6)

Session I — 8:00-9:45 ~ Introduction to the Computational Periodicals This session will introduce approaches to computational periodical studies. It will provide an overview of machine learning as applied to the complex pages of early Soviet periodicals and modeling data extraction. The last part of the session will include time for individual exploration of the digitized journals available in the Princeton collection, including an activity utilizing Yale DH lab’s PixPlot as a research tool.

Session II — 10:00-11:45 ~ Teaching and Learning with Periodicals Collections This session will feature presentations by Antonina Puchkovskaia (ITMO University St. Petersburg) and Christine Jacobson (Harvard University) to open a discussion on curricular development and classroom application of Slavic periodical collections.

Session III — 12:00-1:45 ~ Computer Vision The final session will be dedicated to introducing computer vision through a variety of tools utilized in the Soviet Periodicals project. The first activity will use Teachable Machine to make categories as we train an image recognition model. Hands-on exercises will also include utilizing makesense.ai as we discuss and analyze the process of adding labels and annotations to journal pages.