The 91st Volume
How the Digitised Index for the Collected Works
of Leo Tolstoy Adds a New Angle for Research
Boris Orekhov¹ · Frank Fischer¹⁺²
¹ Higher School of Economics, Moscow
² DARIAH-EU
This presentation: lehkost.github.io/slides/2018-tolstoy-mexico/
DH2018 · Ciudad de México 🇲🇽 · 29 June 2018
The Tolstoy Project
- cooperation between Tolstoy Museum and Higher School of Economics, Moscow
- digital edition of collected works in 90 volumes, published between 1928 and 1958: novels, short stories, plays, letters, diaries, … (~ 46,000 pages)
- "All of Tolstoy in One Click": all volumes scanned and OCRed (supported by ABBYY)
- corrections were crowdsourced
- abundant media coverage: New Yorker, The Guardian, etc.
- texts available in PDF, EPUB, FB2, MOBI and XHTML (see http://tolstoy.ru/creativity/90-volume-collection-of-the-works/)
- also converted to basic TEI
- next stage: richer markup, onthologies, linked open data
The 91st Volume – A New Perspective
- supplement volume containing indexes of works and proper names (fiction and non-fiction works like diaries, letters)
- 16,256 registered entries
- web app: http://index.tolstoy.ru/
- target audience: specialists as well as enthusiasts
- general question: even with digitised full texts at hand, how can we benefit from the structuring and registration efforts of the past?
The Web App
brown: number of references in the text – beige: number of mentions in the comments
Level 1:
Enhanced Searches (1/2)
- original index functionality retained: mapping proper names to volumes and pages
- one-click direct jumps to pages
- added functionality:
- fuzzy searches: entering "ava" will list results like "Poltava", "Bavariâ", "Abdulla-al'-Mamun Zuravardi"
- word-cloud representation conveys a first idea about most frequent words in the corpus
Level 1:
Enhanced Searches (2/2)
word-cloud representation for entry 'Victor Hugo' showing co-occurring named entities – URL: http://index.tolstoy.ru/person/4079/
Level 2:
Studying Life and Works of Leo Tolstoy by Means of Network Analysis (1/3)
co-occurence graph for all 90 volumes – network is downloadable and can be customised – URL: http://index.tolstoy.ru/general/graph/
Level 2:
Studying Life and Works of Leo Tolstoy by Means of Network Analysis (2/3)
- studying co-occurrences of proper names in the same environment (in our case, on the same page) help to understand larger contexts
- example:
- the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita" is found on 5 pages in Tolstoy's Complete Works, see http://index.tolstoy.ru/person/2138/
- it shares these five pages with a total of 43 other names mentioned
- the proximity of these mentionings is not accidental, in our case they form a kind of "Indian cluster" containing works like "Hitopadesha", "Dhammapada", "Vamana Purana", or names like Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa
- for Tolstoy, these titles and names are part of a set of carriers of philosophical knowledge, and are associated with names like Xenophon, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Pascal, Skovoroda, Socrates
- these networks provide great opportunities for understanding the whole range of Tolstoy's interests and ideas
Level 2:
Studying Life and Works of Leo Tolstoy by Means of Network Analysis (3/3)
Nodes ranked by weighted degree in the fictional network (vols. 1–45):*
- Россия/Русь (2778)
- Наполеон I Бонапарт (2712)
- Москва (2689)
- Александр I Павлович (1873)
- Петербург (1830)
- Кутузов Михаил Илларионович/Голенищев-Кутузов (1515)
- Франция (1390)
- Европа (1212)
- Англия (938)
- Германия (789)
Cf. Woody Allen: "I took a speed reading course where you run your finger down the middle of the page and was able to read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It's about Russia."
* Many thanks to Daniil Skorinkin for providing this data.
Level 3:
Editorial Evolution of the "Complete Works"
- a quantification of index properties also gives us insights in the editorial process that lasted more than 3 decades
- the "91st Volume" can show how editorial principles have changed over time, especially in regard of the depth of commenting
- e.g., the 13th volume with draft editions of "War and Peace" has a weak commentary, while the 47th volume (diaries and notebooks) has the most detailed commentary among all 90 volumes
Summary
- making indexes machine-readable is an additional way to research the Collected Works of single authors or similar printed text collections that come with rich and detailed indexes
- functionalities of traditional indexes are not only retained, but also enhanced (fuzzy searches, visualisations of co-occurrences, etc.)
- the Tolstoy web app can serve as a suggestion to apply this method to the Collected Works of other authors
¡Muchas gracias!
✴️
¿Preguntas?
The 91st Volume
How the Digitised Index for the Collected Works of Leo Tolstoy Adds a New Angle for Research
Boris Orekhov¹ · Frank Fischer¹⁺²
¹ Higher School of Economics, Moscow
² DARIAH-EU
This presentation: lehkost.github.io/slides/2018-tolstoy-mexico/
DH2018 · Ciudad de México 🇲🇽 · 29 June 2018