How useful is data analysis in humanities research? What sense does it make to apply quantitative methods to literature, visual art, cinema, historical documents, theater plays and other cultural artifacts? Why do literary scholars count seemingly ‘meaningless’ words like prepositions, conjunctions or articles? What can we learn about a movie if we split it into shots and feed them to the neural network? What are the quantitative differences between the speeches of ‘radicals’ and ‘loyalists’ in the first French post-revolutionary parliament and how that translates into the oratorical success of their speeches? Are there objective differences between theater comedies and tragedies in terms of structure and composition? Can we run 137 thousand paintings through a computer algorithm and make it learn something about painting styles and what makes them different from each other? How do historians reconstruct social networks of the past and what does it have to do with today’s secret services?

In this lecture, Data Scientist Daniil Skorinkin will talk about the current research trends in the field of digital humanities, how digital humanities became such a hype in Western academia, and what all this has to do with the semi-forgotten Russian “data-philologists” of the beginning of the 20th century.