Meet Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia 介绍Antonina Puchkovskaia博士

[中文版]

1. How do you define Digital Humanities?

I always define Digital Humanities through the community of digital humanists who are willing to experiment with interdisciplinary methodologies applied to humanities scholarship. By pushing the boundaries and working at the frontier, this approach helps to see the bigger picture and makes the research more transparent, accessible, and interactive.

2. How did you become interested in DH?

Being a cultural historian by training, I landed my first academic job at a very STEM-based university and found myself quite lonely among computer scientists and web developers. So, I started googling whether there was any intersection between humanities and information technologies. That’s how I first came across ‘digital humanities.’ I then participated in NYC DH Week, where I met the community and felt very inspired. This experience motivated me to propose the launch of a small DH centre to senior management. This initiative evolved into an international and interdisciplinary effort, culminating in exciting collaborative DH projects and the launch of the first MSc in Digital Humanities in Saint Petersburg.


3. Tell us about one of your DH projects? 

My very first DH project as a PI was St. Retrospect, an interactive mapping project aimed at representing culturally significant landmarks in Saint Petersburg. The visualisation is structured around the relationships between locations and historical figures, supplemented by historical overviews of the sites and the notable people associated with them. To collect data, we applied machine learning algorithms, such as NER (Named Entity Recognition), to extract locations and names from openly available digitised and machine-readable sources and then verified this information through crowd-sourcing. As an open-source project, its mission is not only to raise awareness about culturally significant sites within the local community but also to engage the community in evaluating historic locations and collecting relevant data.

4. Tell us a DH project you particularly like?

This small-scale project, Pages of Early Soviet Performance, holds significant importance despite its size. The project utilises machine learning to generate multiple datasets from early Soviet illustrated periodicals related to the performing arts. The project’s importance lies in its attempt to answer crucial questions, such as: what if this collection could be accessed as data? what patterns—of words, phrases, or images—can be discovered across the entire collection? By employing computer vision techniques and training a YOLO (You Only Look Once) real-time object detection model, textual and image data are being produced to facilitate new avenues of research on Soviet culture during the first decades after the October Revolution. Although this may seem like a niche project, it significantly contributes to the methods and approaches for working with digitised sources, extracting valuable data, and making it publicly accessible to foster further research.

介绍Antonina Puchkovskaia博士

1. 你如何定义数字人文学？

我总是通过那些愿意尝试跨学科方法来研究人文学科的数字人文学者群体来定义数字人文。通过突破边界和在前沿探索，这种方法有助于看到更大的图景，并使研究更加透明、可访问和互动。

2. 你是如何对数字人文学产生兴趣的？

作为一名受过文化历史学训练的人，我在一所以STEM为主的大学获得了第一份学术工作，发现自己在计算机科学家和网页开发者中间感到非常孤单。于是，我开始在网上搜索人文学科与信息技术之间的交集。就这样，我第一次接触到了“数字人文”。后来，我参加了纽约市的数字人文周活动，认识了这个社区，并深受启发。这次经历激励我向高层管理人员提议建立一个小型的数字人文中心。这个倡议逐渐发展为一项国际和跨学科的合作，最终促成了多个令人兴奋的数字人文项目，并在圣彼得堡推出了第一个数字人文学硕士课程。

3. 请告诉我们一个你的数字人文学项目？

我作为主要研究者的第一个数字人文项目是「圣彼得堡回顾」，这是一个互动的地图项目，旨在展示圣彼得堡的文化重要地标。该可视化围绕着地点与历史人物之间的关系结构，并补充了这些地点和相关著名人物的历史概述。为了收集数据，我们应用了机器学习算法，例如命名实体识别（NER），从开放获取的数字化和机器可读资源中提取地点和名称，然后通过众包验证这些信息。作为一个开源项目，其使命不仅是提高当地社区对文化重要地标的认识，还通过评估历史地点和收集相关数据来吸引社区参与。

4. 你特别喜欢的一个数字人文学项目是什么？

尽管这是一个小规模项目，但「早期苏联表演的页面」项目具有重要意义。该项目利用机器学习从与表演艺术相关的早期苏联插图期刊中生成多个数据集。其重要性在于试图回答关键问题，如：如果这个收藏能作为数据访问，会怎样？在整个收藏中可以发现什么模式——单词、短语或图像？通过使用计算机视觉技术和训练一个YOLO（You Only Look Once）实时对象检测模型，生成文本和图像数据，以促进对十月革命后最初几十年苏联文化的新研究途径。尽管这似乎是一个小众项目，但它在处理数字化资源、提取有价值数据和公开获取以促进进一步研究的方法和方法方面做出了重要贡献。