Digital Turn Research Articles

Editorial

Editorial Estelle R. Jorgensen It is sometimes surprising when miscellaneous articles on a variety of specific subjects and assigned to an issue in order of their acceptance turn out to have a compelling and common theme. As editors, we sometimes have the sense of a zeitgeist, of a collective unconscious that bubbles up in the topics that compel our authors to write. As this issue goes to press, we are in a global pandemic that we hope will soon abate. We face an array of political, social, racial, ethnic, and economic conflicts and challenges that contribute to unsettlement and even despair for our collective well-being and the welfare of our planet. We are surrounded by a mediated environment in which expertise and truth are too often denigrated, ignorance and foolishness seem to fester and even prosper in public spaces, and frustration, anger, and violence are all too evident. Given this context, it is no wonder that our writers are also troubled by and skeptical of ideas and practices that have been promoted uncritically in music education and that seem not to meet this moment. Even better when they offer us constructive and creative criticism that also suggests alternative ways forward. This is as it is with the articles in this issue. Guilia Ripani critiques notions of “flourishing” proffered by advocates of music education that she views as individualistic and elitist. Instead, she advances the archaic Greek notion of metron or “right measure” that connotes dynamic balance and self-regulation as a more modest and “medium term” music educational objective. She hopes that students will be able to imagine their future flourishing and gain knowledge of themselves and their social agency through musical experiences and “critical reflections” on them. Our readers may notice the consonance of the idea of metron coming from the ancient West with ideas from the ancient East such as yin and yang forwarded by such writers as Victor [End Page 1] Fung and Leonard Tan—that are enjoying renewed interest in music education philosophy. Elizabeth MacGregor is concerned about the supposed benefits of music education for wellbeing touted by advocates of music education. Instead, she observes that students’ experiences of music education run the gamut of emotional responses to these experiences; they are not always conducive to wellbeing as too often assumed. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of “linguistic vulnerability,” she forwards a theory of “musical vulnerability” that she argues needs to be considered by music teachers. Her critique addresses the problem of simplistic understandings of the relationship between music and wellbeing and suggests instead the need for more nuanced understandings of the ways in which teachers and students open themselves to music. Wilfried Gruhn critiques what he sees as a “digital turn” in music education ongoing for some time but forwarded more recently by music teachers’ responses to COVID. He contrasts this embrace of technology as a means of music education that emphasizes virtual and cognitive musical experience with recent advances in cognitive science, learning, and related fields that suggest the importance of the intersection of mind and body in holistic musical learning in the phenomenal world. While technologies open opportunities for music learning, he suggests that they are also limited and even detrimental. This reality leads him to believe that this digital turn should be revoked, and music teachers should continue to emphasize physical experiences of music making in the phenomenal world. Antía González Ben worries about the epistemic suppositions that underlie music educational curricula. As a case in point, she digs beneath the International Baccalaureate High School music curriculum, widely used around the world, and examines the assumptions evident in this curriculum. Among other things, she critiques the notion of “musical culture” employed in this curriculum, its Euro-Americentrism, its musical formalism, its view of musical cultures as fixed and distinct and the roots of this idea in nineteenth century thought. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of “power-as-effects,” she suggests an alternative transformative approach to music curriculum that would take account of “systems of dominance and oppression” that are operative in the musics of the world. Albi Odendaal and Heidi Westerlund fault music education for taking too...

From French Horn to Smartphone: Leveraging Digital Technology and Digital Turn

The shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the implementation of digital technology to advance many new applications. Digital applications were believed to be indispensable for changes in learning environments and strategies that would enhance the capacity and quality of learning through focused motivation, communicative interaction, and stronger self-determination. This text will discuss prominent arguments for digital learning and digital technologies that might initiate a digital turn. To this end, this paper reflects on the psychological and mental conditions of human learning, evaluates the potential opportunities of digital tools within the context of teaching and learning, and concludes with consequences for music learning in public schools.

The “Digital Turn” in Transitional Justice Research: Evaluating Image and Text as Data in the Western Balkans

Abstract The “digital turn” has transformed the landscape of transitional justice research. A wealth of data has been created through social media channels, and new digitisation tools have made existing data more easily accessible. This article discusses the ethical and methodological dimensions of using digital data and novel technologies in transitional justice research based on innovative research using digital archives, digitised transcripts, social media (Facebook) content and digital images. The authors review and evaluate how, in each of these domains, new digital technologies have enabled scholars to expand empirical evidence to understand the mechanics of transitional justice by analysing how data is produced and curated, to interrogate ethical dilemmas involved in those processes and to shift the focus from the ability of transitional justice to fulfil normative goals to how transitional justice is enacted and articulated as a process.

The DISAPALE Project: A New Digital Repository of Lithic and Bone Artefacts

ABSTRACT As for every aspect in our daily lives, in the past two decades a digital turn has stormed Archaeology. More specifically, in the field of Palaeolithic research, 3D recording methods are currently starting to become an established standard in the documentation, study and analysis of lithic artefacts. Once made available to public, the DISAPALE project will represent one of the largest 3D-models repository of lithic artefact: after introducing the project, its goals and main characteristics, the paper first contextualizes the specific nature of the blank material in relation to the 3D recording techniques, and then presents a significant example of the workflow that has been implemented during the DISAPALE project and a comparison between 3D models of three objects realized with two different methods, briefly discussing their relative pros and cons.

DIGITAL TURN OF MATERIAL OBJECTS IN THE TEXTUAL WORKS OF DIGITAL HERMENEUTIC

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the digital turn of new media such as computers and the Internet has significantly impacted the traditional humanities and hermeneutics. When the traditional humanities are updated as the digital humanities, the traditional hermeneutics are also updated as digital. Disciplines such as literary studies and philology turn into digital literary studies and computer philology. Digital texts also replace printed ones because the literary and philological information obtained from digital textual works has a significant function as an essential competence of digital interpretation. At this point, the material objects of the printed textual works appear as immaterial objects of the digital media. The material and non-material impacts of the print media and the digital media on the textual works of digital interpretation in digital literary studies and computer philology are dealt with as the central topic of this work. Finally, answers are searched for these questions: Are the methods of traditional interpretation directly incorporated into the practices of digital hermeneutics? Or are the forms of digital interpretation determined independently of the methods of traditional hermeneutics according to the properties of digital media?

Inclusive online community arts: COVID and beyond COVID

ABSTRACT Inclusivity is an underlying principle of community arts, particularly for learning disabled and autistic people for whom the arts can create spaces of equity and inclusive participation. The Covid-19 pandemic required practitioners to find ways of replicating this sense of inclusivity through online delivery. This “digital turn” raised two recurring concerns. First, the accessibility and inclusivity of online activities; second, the quality of alternative digital provision. This paper examines these themes in the specific context of the Creative Doodle Book, which modelled inclusive online practice with learning disabled participants. Drawing on over 20 interviews with learning-disability focused community arts groups, the paper explores barriers to access, but also issues surrounding support and expectations. However, the focus is equally on the benefits once within an online “space”, including new skills, widening networks, the development of inclusive capital and the opportunity to enable greater agency and self-advocacy both during Covid and beyond.

Welcome to the Digital Village: Networking Geographies of Agrarian Change

Almost 5 billion people—two thirds of the global population—now go online. The Internet has changed how we work, learn, govern, and fall in love. Yet despite its digital turn, geography has failed to grapple with the patterns and significance of Internet connection for rural people and places, particularly in the Global South. This article brings together agrarian studies and digital geography to situate emergent online practices within longer trajectories of agrarian change. To do so, I advance the concept of the digital village, a networked social space in which online practices emerge from existing agrarian relations to reconfigure the strategies of economic survival, the landscapes of home, and the tactics of politics. Drawing on ethnographic research in Myanmar, I show how agrarian relations shape patterns of digital connection and how farmers, migrants, and grassroots activists incorporate Facebook into daily efforts to secure livelihoods, support communities, and mobilize in struggles over land. This analysis yields two key insights: first, digital geographies are embedded in rural relations; second, agrarian questions increasingly play out online.

The archival riot:Travesti/Trans* audiovisual memory politics in twenty-first-century Argentina

This article analyzes the making of travesti/trans* memory politics in Argentina. Focused on audiovisual initiatives, archives, catalogs, novels, and digital activism, it studies how these policies emerged in the wider context of the archival and digital turn. While placing the dialogues with Argentine centrality of memory in social conflict and Latin American archival grassroots politics, this text addresses the role of remembrance in the production of travesti/trans* identity. This article argues that trans* memory initiatives acted as politics of belonging that worked in two levels: defining the limits of a common identitarian past, and reaching a wider cisgender audience to highlight the social violence that defined travesti/trans’ precarious lives. This article shows how by placing travesti/trans* memories in tension with national retelling of the past, they are building politics of belonging to legitimate their claims of social reparation to make new trans* futures possible.

Databases of visual sources in the Internet: problems of heuristics (based on the example of studying the history of the Southern coast of Crimea in the early XX century)

The article analyzes the experience gained by the author in the course of working with three online databases of visual historical sources in the context of studying the transformation of the Southern Coast of Crimea in the late XIX - early XX centuries. They are: the electronic State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation, as well as two crowdsourcing platforms - Pastview and Retromap.ru . The author examines the origin, format, structure of these aggregators of visual historical sources, the information potential of the content, advantages and disadvantages of usage, examples of how visual information found using these databases contributed to solving specific historical and source problems. Different aspects of working with online databases of visual sources are considered in the context of historiographical discussions about the "digital turn" in humanitarian knowledge, the "visual turn" in the structure of the source base of historical research, disputes about the multimodality of the content of historical knowledge. It is suggested that soon online databases of visual sources will become as familiar an information search tool for a historian as electronic catalogues of libraries and archives. The emphasis is placed on the methodology of a systematic approach, methods of complex source studies that allow reconstructing historical reality by analyzing and comparing information extracted from sources of different types (written, pictorial and material) and types.

Book review: Kravchenko S. A. “Sociology of Digitalisation: university textbook”

The review of a new book written by a leading Russian sociologist-theorist Sergey A. Kravchenko is presented. The book analyses the social implications and prospects of the digitalisation. The objectivity of this process leading to the complication of society, its dehumanisation and the emergence of new previously unseen risks, is noted. Scientific and technological innovations reduce the share of traditional risks, natural and technological, but increase the share of institutional risks. Sergey A. Kravchenko calls this new reality the socio-digital-natural reality, in which, primarily in social networks, both human actors and non-human (digital) actors, sociotechnical and techno-social hybrids operate. The author of the book being reviewed concludes that there is a need for a humanistic digital turn, a change in approaches and focus of modern scientific knowledge, which should be integrated and multidisciplinary, based on the social and natural sciences integration, aimed at the analysis of disequilibrium systems in which disequilibrium, turbulence do not exclude the tendencies towards organisation and self-organisation.The peer-reviewed work is an educational publication and it is aimed at developing students’ ability to think critically about the consequences of digitalisation and make balanced managerial decisions. It introduces students to the most modern and advanced sociological theories and concepts.

К ВОПРОСУ ОБ ЭВОЛЮЦИИ ИСКУССТВА В XX-XXI ВВ.: КУЛЬТУРОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ

Art, its role, ways of creation, translation and perception have undergone significant changes in the course of the last century. In general, one can talk of aestheticisation of culture, which could not but have a certain impact on art. The departure from “classical art” began already in the epoch of modernism. The “digital turn” has contributed to new hypostasis of art in culture. The virtual medium has introduced new, unprecedented opportunities both in technical and spiritual aspects. Artworks have become more accessible to the general public, with a possibility of user intervention in creative process and the use of artificial intelligence therein. The phenomenon of cyber art has emerged, requiring profound culturological analysis. The use of digital technologies in creation of artworks actualises the issue of constraints of artificial intelligence potential in creative process as well as the problem of ethical and aesthetic content of works created by neural network with the use of algorithms and other digital technologies. In this regard, the notion of mosaic culture is important – as consisting of disparate elements, lacking consistency and integrity of perception and cognition. The mosaic culture refers one to the concept of “rhizome,” reflecting as well the consumer-oriented aspect of the mass culture. Therefore, this entails a danger of replacing the unique nature by mainstream values, and, moreover, of transformation or even loss of the original ontological and axiological sense of the artwork.

Upravljanje bazama podataka - Japan, postmodernost i digitalni preokret arhitekture

This article offers a framing of the development and adoption of computer aided design tools by Japanese architects in the 1980s and early 1990s that counters the interpolation of their work into conventionalised narratives of a momentous "digital turn." It combines media theoretic and cultural studies approaches to analyse the design practices and design outputs of Japanese architects engaged with computers alongside prevailing political-economic policies and contemporary popular cultural genres/forms such as database novels. The article thereby elaborates on the formation of a "database imagination" of Japan and information management practices through which computer use was framed domestically and internationally in relation to emerging theories of aesthetic and technical postmodernity. Setting these domestic and international framings against one another, the article shows how efforts to construct a particular image of Japan were used by multiple groups to position the country and its architectural production within larger narratives of cultural and technological change. Finally, this positioning is examined as a site through which the cultural specificity of Japan and the co-constructive encounter of Japanese architects with computers was and continues to be negotiated.

К ВОПРОСУ ОБ ЭСТЕТИЗАЦИИ СОВРЕМЕННОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

In the process of retrospective analysis of cultural epochs, one can observe the movement of the pendulum of culture from aestheticism to moralizing, and vice versa. One of the first critics of aestheticization was S. Kierkegaard, who, without denying the significance of the aesthetic, placed the latter below the ethical in the spiritual hierarchy. Domestic philosophers defended the need for a synthesis of ethics and aesthetics. Researchers of the twentieth century point to the trend of total aestheticization, the transformation and deformation of basic moral ideals. In modern times, the phenomenon of aestheticization of all social spheres, including politics and economics, is being updated, which is largely due to the formation of a «consumer society», visual and digital turns in culture. The article analyzes the main features of postmodernism that contribute to aestheticization: fragmentation, massification, clip consciousness, visual turn, loss of sacredness of traditional meanings and symbols. All of the above contributes to the strengthening of the aesthetic component and the violation of the ethical and aesthetic balance. The authors reveal that the absolutization of beauty in art leads to the degradation of tragic genres based on ethical conflicts. Art is able to educate, form a value hierarchy. Thus, art has possibilities that transform a person, which are contained in the synthetic integrity of the ethical and aesthetic, therefore, it already acquires cosmological parameters. In turn, aestheticization as the dominant of culture leads to moral limitations and the destruction of the spiritual integrity of man and society.

Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies ed. by Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell

Reviewed by: Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies ed. by Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell Desirée Henderson (bio) Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies Edited by Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell Routledge 2019, xvii + 258 pp. ISBN 9780367255688, $170.00 hardcover; ISBN 9781032092119, $48.95 paperback. Auto/biography studies has often taken pride in its status as an upstart disciplinary field that developed relatively recently and despite skepticism about the legitimacy of its subject matter. Yet, it is clear that auto/biography studies has now moved into a more mature phase with many establishment markers including subject-specific journals, conferences, organizations, listservs, and so forth. Among such indicators of a field's cohesion are anthologies and essay collections that define the field, highlight its most influential voices, establish a canon of scholarly materials, and lay a foundation for future developments or trends. To such field-defining works, we can now add Kate Douglas and Ashley Barnwell's marvelous collection of essays, Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies. This volume takes method as its central focus, with the promise that the question of how to do lifewriting research encompasses numerous other pressing questions within auto/biography studies such as those regarding the digital turn, praxis, and ethics. The thirty essays are divided into two sections, "Forms" and "Frameworks," but a more salient distinction could be drawn between essays that show (offering brief samples of auto/biographical research or writing) and essays that tell (describing auto/biographical research or writing projects previously completed). The good news is that the volume offers a rich selection of each. Whether showing or telling, certain recurring themes cut across the collection, the most prominent of which is interdisciplinarity. Douglas and Barnwell state in their introduction that although auto/biography studies grew out of English literary studies, the field now embraces a much more diverse and cross-disciplinary set of methods (1). However, there are instructive differences in how the call to interdisciplinarity gets represented within the essays themselves. Some essayists contend that auto/biography studies must embrace interdisciplinarity because literary analysis methods are simply inadequate, particularly when working with unconventional or "unliterary" texts. Julie Rak is the contributor who makes this argument most vehemently in her discussion of the place of big data within auto/biography scholarship, stating that "the study of big data poses [End Page 91] special problems that most life writing methods cannot yet address" (116). Sarah Brophy shares Rak's concern regarding the challenges that digital life content presents to conventional reading methods, recognizing that access to and facility with specialized software for computational analysis may not be possible for literary studies scholars. These essays ask vital questions about whether auto/biography studies is capable of diversifying its methods fast enough to keep up with the proliferation of digital or other life narrative forms that resist being read as literary texts. Other essays in the collection show what is possible when specialists with alternate backgrounds take up life narrative, such as Signe Ravn's description of using creative visuals such as life charts or maps to organize the results of qualitative sociological interviews, or Meg Jensen and Siobhan Campbell's account of their impressive Expressive Life Writing Project, which studies the real-life benefits of storytelling for women who are refugees from conflict zones. Most essays in the volume advocate for a hybrid approach, employing research methods that derive from other disciplines but which pair well with literary criticism. Aimée Morrison describes this as a "mixed methods process" that, in the case of her work on social media, combines genre theory from literary studies, descriptive methods from anthropology and ethnography, and software and hardware analysis methods from new media studies (43). Another notable example of the productive mixing of literary studies and cross-disciplinary methods can be found in Ally Day's account of organizing reading groups to discuss HIV memoirs, a text-focused approach that takes on new significance when the reading groups are composed of women living with HIV, or of AIDS service providers. From these essays, it would appear that the literary studies methods that characterize auto/ biography studies still have merit, but particularly when they are...

Digital transformation of business models: influence of operation and trade variables

This paper aims to determine how digital transformation of operation and trading processes influence the digital transformation of business models in printed media industries. A regression model was applied to address the phenomenon and test the hypothesis. Measurements were performed through a self-administered tool, aimed to executives in a sample including 40 companies in the sector. The results allowed to confirm that the application of digital transformation to trading and operation processes directly leads to a digital transformation of the business model, enhancing the identification of a particular effort and investment approach for the digital turn of businesses.

Nietzsche’s Conception of Place: Blueprint for an Architecture of the Future

In today’s ‘Hypermodern’ world, where space-time compression and digital technological innovations are the dominant modes of existence, Nietzsche’s ideas can still offer alternative perspectives and ways of life. One of the main issues that spatial design disciplines have to face within hypermodernity is the growing deterritorialization of events and human inter-actions, the insurmountable distancing between bodies in space. Digital technology creates ‘spaces of flows’ that transcend communities, regions, places, localities and persons, inaugurating an exponential dematerialization of social and human relations. Although there are strong indications that Nietzsche’s nomadic way of life and thinking would perhaps endorse the digital turn, I would like to argue in the present paper that if we read his textual corpus closely, attentively and slowly, a new possibility emerges: the great value of embodied thinking. My basic working hypothesis is that thinking through the body needs proximity: real Places of the Outside, whether natural or urban, in order to unfold itself. Nietzsche can be used against digitalization and hypermodern ‘non-places’. More specifically, it seems that an important topic has been relatively neglected so far within the vast secondary literature of Nietzsche Studies: his concept, idea or notion of place. This paper aims to offer an introductory analysis of Nietzsche’s conception of place, as elaborated mainly in <i>Ecce Homo</i>. I will try to show the close relationship between place and inspiration, <i>Stimmung</i> and the body, arguing in favor of a new philosophy of locality. I will then suggest that this new idea of place has potentially very interesting consequences, and could open up new, radical questions for contemporary and future architectural theory and practice.

역사지리정보시스템(HGIS)에 기반한 이방익 표해노정의 복원 - 사례연구를 통한 조선시대 표해노정의 종합적 복원 가능성 모색 -

This article aims to retrieve Yi Bang-ik’s drifting routes, which is presented in Record of Drifting Across the Sea (P’yohaerok), via Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS). It also offers a digital mapping method for comprehensive retrieval of Drifting Records in the history of the Chosŏn Dynasty. The recent embrace of Digital Humanities has produced meaningful research in the traditionally technology-averse discipline of History. Digital historical research on the history of the Chosŏn dynasty such as Digital Mapping of Choe Pu’s drifting routes from P’yohaerok and the development of a database of Drifting Records in the Chosŏn Dynasty have gained attention recently.BR Yi Bang-ik’s case was georeferenced and used as a base for a HGIS. Together with digital mapping, a database, which retrieves the routes that the drifters have taken in the late Chosŏn dynasty, would be visualized and retrieved extensively in this article. Yi’s drifting case is apt for digital mapping via HGIS as his case has its historical resources in various forms. Also, the data could be validated by previous non-digital historical research on his journey. BR Digitizing records and presenting research in digital format are not nearly enough for Digital Humanities. Instead, Digital Humanities encourages its researchers to conduct their research digitally and provides a “digital turn” in the methodology. This study attempts to create a new database for Yi Bang-ik’s drifting routes and produces a digital map that does not collide with historical sources. Thus, it conducts a thorough investigation of the routes, which the drifters from Chosŏn followed under the escort of Qing dynasty officials in 1796. In order to build a database, this study utilizes raw data and resources from Open Source materials and freeware. In doing so, it attempts to remove any methodological hurdles and invites both scholars and the public to pursue further research on this matter.

Public librarians' perception of their professional role and the library's role in supporting the public sphere: a multi-country comparison

PurposeThe overarching aim of this article is to consider to what extent the perceptions of librarians in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Sweden reflect a unified view of their professional role and the role of their institutions in supporting the formation of the public sphere and to what extent the variations reflect national contexts.Design/methodology/approachThe multi-country comparison is based on online questionnaires. The central research questions are how do librarians legitimize the use of public resources to uphold a public library service? How do librarians perceive the role of public libraries as public spaces? How do librarians perceive their professional role and the competencies needed for it? Consideration is given to how the digital and social turns are reflected in the responses.FindingsThe results show evidence of a unified professional culture with clear influences from national contexts. A key finding is that librarians see giving access as central for both legitimizing library services and for the library's role as a public sphere institution. Strong support is shown for the social turn in supporting the formation of the public sphere while the digital turn appears to be a future challenge; one of seemingly increased importance due to the pandemic.Research limitations/implicationsThis study shows that libraries across the seven countries have expanded beyond simply providing public access to their book-based collections and now serve as social, learning and creative spaces: both in the physical library and digitally. Qualitative research is needed concerning librarians' notions of public libraries and librarianship, which will provide a more in-depth understanding of the changing professional responsibilities and how public libraries recruit the associated competencies.Originality/valueThe article provides a much needed insight into how librarians perceive the role of public libraries in supporting the formation of the public sphere and democratic processes, as well as their own role.

Digital Technologies in the Field of Culture: Theorizing the Issue of Digital Data and Cultural Heritage

The purpose of the research is to reveal the peculiarities of the digital collections functioning in the field of cultural heritage. Research methodology is based on the application of a systematic approach to the digitization issue’s study of cultural heritage sites and museum practice. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is the issue’s actualization of the functioning of digital collections of cultural heritage in the cultural context, the statement of the digital canon expansion in the field of cultural heritage. Conclusions. It is emphasized that the discrepancy between the scale of digitized content and the real number of non-digitized and unpublished works of culture and art raises important questions about who decides which works will be published, will enter the scientific and educational circulation, will expand the digital canon and will serve as a source of inspiration for the general public. Thus, the range of problems in the development of digital collections and digital content aggregators in the field of cultural heritage becomes evident. Digital publishing platforms should be seen as primary sources that reflect the cultural, political and social issues of the modern era and reveal ontological and epistemic gaps in the perception of cultural, ethnic and social affiliation. The analysis of conceptual and methodological approaches to the development of modern digital technologies in the field of cultural heritage, which defined the digital turn for all modern cultural processes, allows us to understand the basic patterns and trends associated with recording, analysis and transmission of cultural heritage at the present stage. Critical analysis of digital infrastructures enables the cultural study of the digital turn in the field of cultural heritage in order to identify the possibilities and limitations of digital technologies in the analysis, publication and dissemination of textual and visual materials, demonstrating works of culture and art.

Hamburg–Saint Petersburg, Sanit Petersburg–Nice: Scenarios for the stability of twinning under stress

Against the background of the global COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing geopolitical tensions between the Russian Federation and the West, this chapter engages with the dynamics of European-Russia city diplomacy in times of crisis. By means of two representative case studies of existing twinning cities, namely Hamburg–Saint Petersburg on the one hand, and Nice–Saint Petersburg on the other, this chapter explores the evolution of twinning relations during the politically sensitive times. While paying attention to the legal bases and the historic evolution of selected cases of city cooperation, the authors identify major tendencies as well as opportunities in the field of city twinning and engage with the so-called digital turn in city diplomacy which has manifested itself since the start of the global health crisis in early 2020.