Understanding Digital History
At Broadstreet, we occasionally sit down with other scholars to discuss their work. Recently I had the chance to chat with my Chicago colleague Faith Hillis, a historian of modern Russia. Faith is the author of Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation and, most recently, Utopia's Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s–1930s. For the latter book, she published some of her data, in the form of maps and other visualizations, on a dedicated website. Once rare, and still uncommon, such practices belong to the emerging field of “digital history,” itself a branch of the “digital humanities.” From the reader’s perspective, they add another dimension to rich historical narratives. One might also speculate that such visualizations help the author herself, suggesting patterns that can be further explored in primary sources. And for followers of Broadstreet, they provide another point of contact between the social sciences and the discipline of history.
Our conversation touches on these and related issues. Faith’s subject matter is surprisingly timely. Today, as in the period Faith examines, discussion of Russia’s future takes place in émigré communities abroad: in Yerevan, Berlin, Tbilisi, and the like. Now, as then, émigré publications establish the terms of debate, though today the typical medium is the Internet. Faith’s work, and her forays into the digital humanities, show how space and media forged the ideas and personalities that, in turn, shaped Russian history. In so doing, they may help us to understand what lies ahead.
Scott: Faith Hillis, welcome to Broadstreet.
Faith: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Scott: We're talking about your recent work on Russian colonies in Europe in the years prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. I would like to discuss the digital work that you've done. But before we get to that, can you tell us a bit about the broader project in which your digital work is situated?
Faith: Let’s dissect the words “Russian” and “colony” in a moment; I was aware as I was writing the book that both were problematic in their own way. Utopia’s Discontents is the first synthetic history of Russian radical émigrés abroad—everywhere they went in Europe, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What I was trying to do was revisit a very old intellectual history that was always aware that people from the Russian Empire went abroad to think and publish and associate. We were aware that that was important, but we hadn't ever really thought seriously about the communities that travelers created and the fact that these people lived in very small, very dense, very complex and diverse neighborhoods, and also the fact that they moved around a lot—actually quite constantly. I was interested in thinking about space, about the kinds of encounters people have in exile, and in turn how those experiences shape their ideas.
Scott: We'll get to space in a second, but you mentioned that we can dissect both “Russian” and “colony.” Let's dissect the first term, at least. To what extent were the Russian colonies you study in Utopia's Discontents “Russian,” whether we understand that term as a cultural or a linguistic or an ethnic or a national category?
Faith: They weren’t actually Russian in any of those ways! They were Russian only in the sense that the people who lived in them originated from the Russian Empire. One of the big arguments of the book is that these were overwhelmingly non-Russian ethnic spaces, that in most cases, Russian served as a lingua franca, but that there were many languages spoken and many national projects elaborated in these spaces. As I wrote the book, I did struggle with whether it was confusing to simply call this space “Russian.” But in the end, I couldn't figure out a better a better way of describing the culture of these communities.
I would also say that an argument for this usage is that these communities, although they're full of exiles and émigrés, were deeply invested in the future of Russia and the Russian Empire. In other words, people “left” physically, but they hadn't left in other ways.
Scott: Let's move on to the geospatial work that you did. You mentioned that people were moving around a lot. Was that the primary motivation for doing geospatial analysis, or how did you get interested in doing that? And maybe tell us a little bit about what's available online for those who are interested.
Faith: I have an online supplement to the book that includes an extensive list of sources, and I used some digital techniques that were not geospatial, some analysis of publications produced abroad—but primarily this was geospatial. I think I first became interested in digital history when I realized that these groups were constantly in motion—and also when I realized that organizations were in motion, that books were in motion…Certainly these stories of being in motion came out of my sources, but I was finding that I couldn't quite visualize all of the movement until I mapped it. So my natural impulse was just to map it.
I learned the basics of GIS during a sabbatical that I had at Harvard at the Davis Center [for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University].
Scott: Oh, we did the same course, probably, over the winter break?
Faith: Yes, I took that introduction to GIS. The theme at the Davis Center that year was “Mapping Cultural Space,” so people were interested in similar questions. I guess I had enough interest in this approach to apply to that fellowship, but the fellowship furthered my interest. And as I was working, because I was a novice, I was also wondering: Is this something that we do to showcase our work in new ways, to have interactive maps that people can play with, or is it actually a tool of argument? I use it in the companion website in both ways, but I will say that there were some mapping projects that I did that were surprising, that actually opened my eyes to patterns that were there. And then once I went back to the sources, I noticed them, but I hadn't noticed them previously.
Scott: Can you give an example?
Faith: One of the things about this approach from a historical standpoint is the problem of data sets. No data sets exist per se, so one has to compile them. And as one compiles them, you become very aware of how fragmentary and therefore unscientific they are. But I did have a fairly good data set of students who left the Russian Empire to study in Zurich in the early 1870s. And I was just thinking, oh, it would be cool to have a map of where people were from and see how many were from this or that province. I mapped that out. But when I mapped it out, the result was really fascinating. It showed that, yes, there were a lot of students from Moscow and Petersburg: not surprising. But what was surprising was that there was this sort of borderland belt from which students were originating, beginning in the Baltics, stretching through Belarus and Ukraine, going through the Caucasus and then even going out to Siberia. It was only when I made that map that a major theme of the book—that these were borderland communities, communities primarily of ethnic minorities or people not from the Russian center—it was only then that that argument began to coalesce. Maybe I would have eventually recognized it in the sources, but it was the map that hit me over the head with the theme.
Scott: That's interesting. It relates to one of the questions I wanted to ask, which is whether there are particular advantages that a historian brings to this sort of work. I guess one advantage is that you can go back to the sources to try to understand the pattern that you see in a way that might be harder for somebody with a different disciplinary background.
Faith: Exactly: I saw the data that I collected as a way of spurring a closer reading.
There is a debate in the digital humanities. Is this replacing humanities? Are we just STEM-ifying our humanities fields? And I found in the end that there is a way that humanities and data-driven approaches could work in concert. But again, I do think—and I try to convey in the maps—that there needs to be a healthy skepticism about the scientific nature of our data, because it isn't scientific. I think it can gesture to broad patterns and can attune us to themes we need to be thinking about, but I would never say this is a map that shows everyone who lived here or everyone who moved in this way.
Scott: Let's talk about that a bit. One of the one of the data sets that you have posted online is of émigré publications, some 1700 publications over many years. You emphasize on the website that that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of titles there were lost or never catalogued. Other than the fact that the publications that are included are, I suppose, larger in circulation, in what other ways should we think of your data as more or less representative of the broader universe?
Faith: Well, again, I'll have to talk about the way I compiled it. I essentially used WorldCat, which is a massive catalogue of many library consortiums. And I basically just scraped it, looking for publications in the languages of the Russian Empire that were published outside of the Russian Empire. So I'm entirely dependent on the wiles of that database—things that are not in the libraries that participate are not represented. Nonetheless, I think it can gesture to important patterns. Although I can't definitively claim that 60% of the texts published before 1860 in France are in Polish, for example, I can see that Poles were overrepresented among the ranks of émigrés in France before 1860. And I can see that over time, the demographic nature of the emigration changed.
So again, I think I look at those visualizations, not as any kind of statement about demography or its reality, but as an encouragement to ask more and different questions. Is this pattern in the data reflected in my sources? Indeed, Paris is a very important center of Polish emigration, and it becomes more Russian over time. Why is that, when does that happen, and to what extent does what I am seeing in the sources comport to the data?
Scott: On that note, one of the figures on your website shows a substantial transition in the 1870s or 1880s from Polish-language to Russian-language publications. Is that just because of the cataloguing, or does that represent something real in terms of who had emigrated and in what language they were publishing?
Faith: It could somewhat be a result of the database, but through other sources, I can ascertain that that was a real factor…It has to do with the rise of the radical revolutionary movement in Russia outside of Poland, the populist movement, the rise of new socialist movements and then the state repression of these groups that forced them into emigration. Indeed, it is clear that growing numbers of Russian speakers fled Russia in exactly this time period and began culturally overwhelming the old Polish emigration.
Scott: On that topic, and in moving to the part of your digital work that’s more explicitly geospatial, you have a map that shows that many of the residents of the Russian colonies were Jewish émigrés from the Pale of Settlement. Do you have a sense of the role that residence restrictions, the May Laws, or the pogroms of the early 1880s might have played in seeding Russian colonies abroad?
Faith: I think the general landscape of repression was very important. We know that Jews were the group that was most likely to leave the Russian Empire. There is some evidence that there were not actually huge waves of migration immediately after pogroms, that most émigrés were economic migrants. But the reasons that motivated economic migration were tied to discrimination, in that Jews were only allowed to work in certain professions, which produced immiseration and the desire to leave.
Scott: Another thing that jumps out from the maps on your website—say, if you look at the map of émigré sites in Paris—is just how clustered in space they really were. How did this affect intellectual exchange among Russian exiles?
Faith: This is something else: the actual spatiality of these communities was difficult to really conceptualize until you see it on a page. Paris is a great example because it’s, then and now, a small walkable city. That said, it had several quite distinct Russian communities. And that meant that you could have groups traveling in separate orbits, but there was also a lot of communication among them.
As an example, around the Latin quarter, getting out towards where we have our University Paris Center in the 13th arrondissement, this was a major center for Russian radicals—from all over the Empire, but primarily a russophone community. In the Marais, there was a very well established Jewish proletarian community, and you had a lot of radical Jews from the Russian Empire—anarchists, Marxists—settling there. In each place, the groups had their own local infrastructure, they had their own networks of clubs and cafés and cabarets, but you also see that the groups did cross the bridge and they did talk to each other and they did have mass meetings together, so there was this cross pollination. It was really interesting to map that out.
Scott: One of your maps emphasizes that people, goods and texts were not static in location, but moved across space. Can you say a little about that?
Faith: There was constant motion, and I mapped some of the itineraries that my figures made—again, not to make any kind of scientific statement, but just to show how much they moved, that they were moving in many cases every few months. This circulation was sometimes due to practical reasons: you would get evicted or you would get in trouble in one country and you'd have to leave for another.
At the same time, it did follow broad geopolitical developments. One example I'll give, which is a big moment in my story, is when France and Russia form an alliance in the 1890s. Life becomes much, much worse for the Russian radicals who are living in France, and you see an immediate exodus—mostly to London, but also to Switzerland.
So there are moments of historical break where people have to leave. But the fact that these people were moving also meant that ideas were. With the beginning of the Bolshevik party, the debates happened at a conference in London, but very soon everyone, everywhere, knew about it because participants who had been there were reporting back on what happened.
Scott: Stepping back a bit, you say on your website that you're interested in using these new technologies to communicate your work to other scholars and to the general public. Do you identify as a digital humanist?
Faith: I don't know. I think I identify as someone who has used digital humanities. Identifying as a digital humanist seems a little more grandiose. There are people who have much deeper groundings in this field and I feel like a bit of a dilettante. I will say that people love maps—people love interactive maps—and I do think maps offer a powerful way of storytelling. There are definitely people who, I think, would never get through my whole book who have sat around playing with my maps or playing with my visualizations. And I think that's one means of communication.
Scott: You don't necessarily identify as a digital humanist, but you've done work in some part of the digital humanities. You've used those tools in your work. And so you've probably given some thought to how the humanities in general, and history in particular, might change in response to developments in information technology.
Faith: Well, as I said, I don't think that the ways that I use this technology are going to be particularly compelling to people who are deeply wedded to data-driven research, in the sense that I'm still definitely on the humanities end of the spectrum in terms of how I think about truth. But I do think that historians can engage with these technologies in ways that help them ask new questions.
Once again, I think the goal is not to just learn new tricks that we use on the job market, or just to say that we do something more data-driven when we really don't. I think it is to look at different kinds of sources, different kinds of data, in conjunction with more traditional approaches and to be open to the questions that raises.