1 Avant-gardes and Emigres: Digital Humanities and Slavic Studies Submitted by clw95 on Mon, 2015-08-31 10:19 By Marijeta Bozovic, Yale University In April 2015, Stanford University’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Humanities Center hosted an ambitious and experimental one-day conference on “Russian Formalism and the Digital Humanities.” The event, organized by Mellon Fellow Jessica Merrill with the assistance of Andrei Ustinov, brought together two distinct camps: Digital Humanities pioneers, including Franco Moretti (Distant Reading, 2013) and Matthew Jockers (Macroanalysis, 2013), and leading scholars of Russian Formalism. The aim of the conference was to locate “quantitative literary analysis within the broader spectrum of 20th century literary theory by comparing recent work in the Digital Humanities with Russian Formalism—long considered the foundational movement for modern literary theory.” In the opening talk, however, Moretti immediately questioned whether it would be possible for these two subfields or modes of analysis to come together. While the Digital Humanities researchers were happy to find continuity with classics such as Tynianov’s essay “On Literary Evolution,” the theorists, on the whole, remained skeptical. Ilya Kliger (NYU), in particular, offered an eloquent critique: while the two formalisms share surface similarities, Kliger argued, current practices of Digital Humanities resemble more the “historical poetics” research that preceded the Formalists and prompted their incisive interventions. Tynianov warns against fixed, reductive models for the analysis of culture, calling instead for a “dynamic archeology” of form. The debate continued and grew at the National Humanities Center’s faculty seminar in Digital Textual Studies in June 2015, led by Jockers and Willard McCarty (Humanities Computing, 2005). Faculty working in fields ranging from ancient Greek, modern Chinese history, and contemporary poetry to sociology and feminist theory gathered to imagine the future of an umbrella term encompassing a series of practices, not quite a discipline, and not entirely method. The marginalization of Digital Humanities in many disciplines within the humanities, and of research making use of computational tools, proved a recurrent topic of discussion: “distant reading” studies of the nineteenth-century English novel, for example, are more likely to be cited by other DH practitioners than by nineteenth-century English literature scholars outside of DH. While the dramatic growth of Digital Humanities conferences, of DH panels at the Modern Languages Association convention, and the veritable explosion of related publications in recent years attest to the fact that more and more graduate students and faculty are interested in and experimenting with digital tools and