From Text to Number

At the end of August, the Department of History of the School of Arts and Humanities of the HSE University - St. Petersburg together with the Student Scientific Society of the History programme wrapped up their Summer School, 'Turns in the Social Sciences and Humanities: from Text to Number'.

The Summer School consisted of four blocks - anthropology, visual studies, linguistics, and digital humanities. In each block, participants learned about the changes occurring in social science.

One of the main ideas behind the 'turns' was to review the research methodology which ultimately led to their interdisciplinary nature. That was precisely the main goal of the Summer School - to equip the participants with interdisciplinary research skills and develop several group projects which, after expert evaluation, will be offered at the HSE Project Fair.

The Summer School was attended not only by students of various social and humanitarian educational programmes at HSE University - St. Petersburg, but also students from other cities: Moscow, Tomsk, Samara, Izhevsk, Minsk. Classes were led by teachers of the St. Petersburg campus, including Marina Loskutova, Vlada Baranova, Alexei Kupriyanov, as well as invited lecturers from the Moscow campus - Daria Prisyazhniuk, Armen Aramyan and senior research associate at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexey Frolov. Over the course of four days participants studied digital research methods and their visualisation, and approaches and methodologies in the fields of oral history and modern social anthropology. The preparatory part of the School ended with design activities as part of the 'visual turn' in the museum space of the Hermitage. All this allowed the Summer School participants to immerse themselves in the world of interdisciplinary research while preparing their own projects, which they then presented and discussed at a final defense on the last day.

Daria Moskvina, HSE Campus - St. Petersburg, History programme, fourth-year student:

The Summer School has truly inspired me for the new academic year. The knowledge I gained there was immediately tested in practice: whether it was programming in R, or building a GIS system. Most of all I enjoyed working on the group project: I came up with ideas and talked about things that would unlikely be a topic of discussion at regular seminars.

Liliya Kazakova, HSE Campus - Nizhny Novgorod, Fundamental and Applied Linguistics programme, fourth-year student:

It was obvious that the School was being held for the first time, but not in a bad sense - one could see how the organisers were doing their best. All the lectures were wonderful. Most of all I liked the ones about the linguistic landscape and visual rotation. It was really great to go to the Hermitage! In general, I liked participating in the School and would love to do so again.

The Summer School's social page on VK: https://vk.com/hsespbsummerschool