Text Mining the Gulag

• In Event: Gulag Studies 1: New Sources and Approaches

Abstract

My paper will discuss the creation and initial exploration of a corpus of Gulag narratives. Currently consisting of roughly 1,600 texts (mainly memoirs of incarceration) and approximately 43 million words, this corpus of historically significant material enables new access to a body of writing that is far too large to be humanly readable. Studies employing traditional methodologies inevitably sample, or focus on the most famous or easily available texts; by contrast, this corpus – even though it is far from including all the memoirs ever written on the Gulag – allows greater scope and depth of analysis, enabling, for example, lexical comparisons, and identification of patterns, sources of commonality, and uniqueness, that will be of great value to both historians and literary scholars.

Author

• Sarah Jean Young, U College London (UK)