This Digital Humanities Certificate project is called "The Female Worker of the East" (trans. from Russian - “Труженица Востока”). The project shares its title with the publication it is based on, a short periodical published between 1927 – 1929 in the Russian language. There are several terms used to describe these prints, mostly brochures and pamphlets - I will use brochure going forward. Each brochure consists of 30-50 pages of text, drawings and photographs, describing the livelihoods of women from thirty ethnic groups living across Soviet geography. The title signals to how Soviet ethnographers, who compiled the brochures, conceptualized the idea of the inner “East”. The geographic perimeters of the inner East in Soviet imagination extended from Caucasus to Central Asia, Siberia, Transbaikalia, Amur region, Kamchatka and Chukotka, described Natalya Chernyaeva, who writes extensively about various works of early Soviet ethnographers.
At first glance, I noticed a descriptive, structural and marketing uniformity among the brochures. For one, the ethnic groups within each respective brochure appear to have been described as backwards, particularly the women. Structurally, all thirty have the same number of chapters, following the same narrative structure, which starts with an overview of the environment each community inhabits, followed by observations on the roles of women in the community as whole and in the family, finalized by developments brought to these communities after the revolution. From the marketing standpoint, all had a circulation of 7000 copies, with prices ranging between 18-22 cents (trans. from Russian копеек). Considering such a limited scope and Russian being the language of the publication, it is reasonable to assume that the intended public for them were educated elite and institutional settings, such as libraries and universities.
However, I decided to take a closer look at these historical documents to try to unearth what their authors might have hidden in plain sight. For this interrogation I decided to utilize topic modeling using spaCy, a natural language processing (NLP) model which uses Python to operate. For my research I identified the following questions:
-
What are the main topics that are shared among brochures? Do they match to the results of the close reading?
-
How are the Muslim women, who represent 13 out of 30 ethnic groups accounted for in the brochures, described in comparison to their non-Muslim counterparts? How does the topic modeling demonstrate these discrepancies? Are there any discrepancies that came up in the topic modeling outputs?
-
What decisions are made to determine which stopwords to keep and which to remove in the pre-processing? How do these decisions impact the topic modeling output?
-
Considering that topic modeling is designed to analyze representative or thematic samples of large data sets, what the benefits of utilizing it with a small corpus?
Overall, I argue that "The Female Worker of the East" presents a nuanced view of the lives of ethnic women according to which they were hardworking, skilled, and learned individuals. Even though this diversity of experiences is toned down by the state's agenda to highlight the negative aspects of their lives, it is important to look beyond that propoganda language. Topic modeling as a tool allowed to engage with this corpus distantly, and in combination with close-reading and contextualization from secondary sources, directed targeted investigation. Thus this project serves as teaching tool for researchers of Soviet gender and minority histories to engage with the outputs and make their own discoveries. In addition, digital humanists interested in using topic modeling as a primary analytical tool might find this project intriguing as it deliberately explored a small corpus, and showcases the limitations and advantages of this method.
In English:
Hirsch, Francine. Ebook of Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press, 2005. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb40037.0001.001.
Massell, Gregory J. The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929. Princeton University Press, 1974. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0s37.
Meet the Method: Computational Text Analysis
Python Tutorials for Digital Humanities
Topic Modeling Russian History
In Russian: