Author: Natalia Ermolaev

by Julia Khait (PhD Student, Musicology)

This summer I had a great opportunity to be a part of a group of Princeton faculty and students participating in the First Princeton-Herder Digital Summer Workshop Digitally Mapping Eastern Europe in Marburg, Germany. The conversation centered around maps and the ways scholars can think about them and use them in a digital world. I am sure that for every participant the workshop was useful in a different way, but I would like to point out a couple of things that I found to be particularly inspiring.

 

First, I am a musicologist by training, and maps are something that does not seem to be a part of a musicological toolbox. They certainly do not have to be. However, when I was preparing my presentation for this workshop entitled Mapping ‘Sovetskaia muzyka,’ I forced myself to think about the material I am working on in a different – that is, spatial – way, which definitely gave me a fresh perspective on already familiar texts and raised some interesting questions. Also, the range of topics discussed during the workshop was not limited just to geospatial modeling; it also included more general problems applicable to any DH project, such as gathering and cleaning data, preservation and institutional support, public involvement and DH pedagogy.

I guess I would describe our work during the seminar as a process of finding a common language – across various languages and countries (Ukraine, Hungary, Germany, Belorussia, Poland, Israel), backgrounds and specialties (historians, geographers, cartographers, IT specialists, literary scholars, art historians, urban historians), levels of technological expertise, stages in career (undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, librarians, professors). It was refreshing – and I hope mutually beneficial – to see such a diverse group generously sharing their experiences and expertise.

 

I would also like to point out the flexibility of the program and the range of formats, which included panel and group discussions, hands-on GIS workshops, individual presentations, individual consultations with Herder Institute staff, which allowed participants to individually navigate through the sessions and make most of their time at Herder.

 

Even though it is impossible to call yourself a digital mapping specialist after attending one workshop, it definitely gave an idea of the range of possibilities geospatial modeling can provide. I guess one of the most important – even if unexpected – results of the seminar were newly found skepticism about maps, and some understanding of what they can and cannot do, which is crucial for creating a successful DH project.

by Leora Eisenberg (class of 2020, Slavic major)

“I like maps because they lie,” says Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. “Because they give no access to the vicious truth. Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly, they spread before me a world not of this world.” Szymborka’s words almost echo the theme of the inaugural Princeton University-Herder Institute conference in the digital humanities: digitally mapping Eastern Europe.

 

As an undergraduate, I was, admittedly, intimidated by the professors and graduate students who knew far more about Eastern Europe than I. While some were new to the notion of digital humanities and digital mapping, they certainly knew more about the “analog maps” (as we came to call them during the conference) than I may ever know. That said, the atmosphere was one of learning, rather than one of competition. In a particularly illuminating workshop, we split up into groups and analyzed maps of different genres (e.g. ethnographic, touristic, administrative, etc.) of the same geographical area and tried to determine what distinguished them, what they were revealing, and what they were hiding. In the days after the workshop, I found myself poring over any map I could find, just to practice my newfound “map analysis muscle.”

 

Time in the Herder Institute’s archives was also invaluable! Although my region of interest is not Eastern Europe — it is, rather, Central Asia — it was an excellent foray into archival research. I browsed through all of the maps in their collections that are relevant to my studies, and am now returning to Princeton with a series of question that I will perhaps answer in later research. Learning about digital humanities as a field and all of the ways to incorporate it into my studies was enlightening; I hadn’t even begun to consider the possibilities!

 

With that in mind, I’m looking forward to the year ahead and to all of the work I will do in the sphere of digital humanities, whether it be related to mapping or not. It had better be good, though, because I hope to present it next year when the Herder Institute comes to visit us at Princeton!