Digital Philological Practices: the Project “Chekhov Digital”

Abstract

The article examines the role of “digital practices” in the formation of interdisciplinary humanitarian knowledge, the peculiarities of the development of digital humanitarian projects in the field of philology. The model of development of a digital project in the field of preparation of semantic markup of literary publications “Chekhov Digital”, which is a digital publication of the academic Сomplete works and letters of A. Chekhov, is considered. The goal of the project is to develop machine-readable (semantic) markup of the writer’s texts based on the standards of digital publication Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Within the framework of the project, standards for the preparation of digital Russian-language publications are being clarified, conceptual and technical conditions for implementation are being formulated, and infrastructure and new research methods are being developed. The structure of machine-readable annotation of documents has been developed, which enables marking up semantic entities in Chekhov’s texts, notes and comments for building semantic search within the corpus of the writer’s texts. To clarify the markup of semantic entities in the works of A. Chekhov the methods of automatic text processing were used, including topic modeling and vector semantic models to analyze the most important author’s concepts in the texts; corpus methods for studying the contexts of the use of verbal representations of concepts. The conceptual analysis made it possible to reconstruct the author’s concepts in the context of the markup of semantic entities. To mark up the names of real people and objects, a special database, based on pointers to letters, has been created. The project implements the principle of Open data, one of the goals of which is to create scientific communities around data. The work on the project has led to the development of scientific cooperation between the Centers for Digital Humanities of the HSE and the SFedU.