Our process

We began by marking up a textbook in Russian using XML, taking note of key proper nouns (names, places..etc). This mark-up was completed in Oxygen using XML, with a schema we created specifically for this project. This schema can be found in our GitHub page in the "schema" folder.

In addition to marking up key nouns, we additionally marked up propogandistic terms. To see our reflection on this aspect, please read through the "analysis" page of the website.

Our corpus

We're using the textbook Кратктй Курс Истории СССР (A Short Lesson on the History of the USSR): a textbook printed in 1955 for third and fourth grade Soviet history classes. You can read through a digital version on the "Corpus" page of our website, complete with a table of contents and pop-ups for key terms. To see the original, you can visit this site.

We chose this text for it's ease of readability, and condensation of the information deemed necessary for the education of children in the USSR. There were two benefits to this, first, that the material for younger children in the USSR makes for more digestable material to readers outside the USSR. The second benefit was the ease with which we could read the text ourselves. Our markup was done manually, and in the native Russian, so the lighter material served us well.

Clicking on the digital edition availble on our corpus page will first bring the use to the table of contents, completed using XSLT, which contain links that help the user navigate to various chapters within the textbook. The buttons on the screen screen similarly navigate from chapter to chapter. On each page, there is a smaller version of the table of contents on the left-hand side, with the current chapter highlighted. This table of contents also contains clickable links. You will find highlighted the terms which we have deemed as important context. Hovering over these terms will bring up a pop-up containing information we have written about each term. Each page (except for the first and last) was completed using a one to many transformation in XSLT.

About Russian

Please use the translator in your browser to read in english/your native language. We find that the translations are accurate to a certain extent, though sometimes the browser translation is too literal. For example, "в Средней Азии" would always reasonably be translated as "in Central Asia" but the browser will render "Middle Asia."

Outlook

This project was limited to the analysis of just one textbook given the scope of the Digital Methods in Humanistic Research class. However, in the future, these same methods and schema can be applied to other textbooks for a more comprehensive analysis.