Digital Dostoevsky: Further Adventures in TEI and Computational Text Analysis

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Digital Dostoevsky is a computational text analysis project hosted at the University of Toronto that is engaged in creating a TEI edition of Dostoevsky's novel corpus and using the TEI files for research. Our research questions are based on what we can learn from a deep structural understanding of Dostoevsky’s novels. Is Golyadkin’s double real? What is the relationship of the pre-novel events of _Demons_ and the novel’s chronology? Does the epilogue of _Crime and Punishment_ fit the novel? And what is the function of quotation in _Brothers Karamazov_? These are just a few of the questions the project asks. At ASEEES in 2023, members of the project team presented preliminary findings and engaged in a roundtable discussion of the value of TEI as a method. One year on, our 2024 roundtable continues that discussion, with an update on the extent of our corpus encoding and emphasis on how to develop research questions using an encoded corpus, what kind of tools can be used to conduct research using a TEI corpus, the differences and similarities between computational text analysis and classic formalist and structuralist approaches to the literary text, and the way these new methods can complement analytical techniques such as close reading. Along the way, the Digital Dostoevsky team will highlight surprising discoveries we’ve made and the insight we’ve gained into the corpus on our further adventures in TEI and computational text analysis.

Sub Unit

• Digital Humanities

Chair

• Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis U

Roundtable Members

• Katherine Bowers, U of British Columbia (Canada)

• Braxton Boyer, U of Toronto (Canada)

• Kate Rowan Holland, U of Toronto (Canada)

• Elena Vasileva, U of Toronto (Canada)