Alexey Golubev, assistant professor in the UH department of History, will present Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its Challenges in the Digital Age on Thursday, February 21 at 12 noon in the UH Libraries Digital Research Commons. The talk will be followed by a workshop on constructing and maintaining a corpus in digital projects. Sandwiches and coffee will be served.

Golubev will speak on the production of digital archives in a broader context of the political economy of historical knowledge in Russia. The archive is a key institution that asserts state sovereignty over history by defining the dominant forms of historical knowledge, its limits and silences, and establishing hierarchies of voices from the past. Modern information technologies represent a formidable challenge to maintaining this epistemic sovereignty as they have simplified to the extreme a precise reproduction of historical documents and production of digital archives. The talk will focus on several cases of digital archives to discuss this challenge and the measures that the Russian state implements to maintain its sovereign control over historical knowledge.

Golubev’s experience in digital humanities stems from his work on several digital collections and archives, including a digital archive of the Russian imperial newspaper News of the Olonets Governorate (1838-1917). He currently works on a project to create a corpus of Russian war letters, supported by a seed grant from the Digital Research Commons.