“Text” – what lies beneath these four letters? Is there a way to analyze such a subjective matter, as literature? This question has been exciting scientists – theorists of literature, linguists and even mathematicians – for over a hundred years, starting from early 19th century. Tradition of summer semiotic schools was started by Yuriy Mikhailovich Lotman – culture expert, philologist and semiotics expert, one of the founders of Tartu-Moscow Semiotics School. In 1960, Mikhail Lotman published his article “Literature Studies Have to Become Science”, which became the starting point of the Tartu’s School of Semiotics program. Since 1964, Mikhail Lotman became the Head of summer schools in Kaariku settlement in Estonia, a sports base of the Tartu University.
In 1970s, these schools stopped, and after half a century, they returned. Originators of reviving summer schools are Linguistic School under the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Tartu Laboratory under Department of Russian literature and an estate museum of L. Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana.
Choise of Yasnaya Polyana as a venue is not a coincidence. Organiser of the School Anastasiya Bonch-Osmolovskaya explained: “Two factors met here: First, Yasnaya Polyana is a symbolic place for Russian philology. Second - two year ago we already made a joint project with Fekla Tolstaya, so we have had good personal relations”.
Today, with emergence of “computer science”, scientist’s dreams of accurate approach to text analysis have got their chance to come true. Our digital time, when many methods of data analysis emerged, have made it possible to substantiate humanitarian theories. Now text-mining (intellectual text analysis) can be used with fiction. But it is not an easy task, a real challenge for a scientist.
School participants gathered in Yasnaya Polyana precisely in order to learn using accurate methods of analyzing big text corpuses that usually stay outside of research. Their professional background is different – here are experienced scientists and students. The organizers observe their mission in creating a specific scientific environment, which would unit representatives of several sciences. Philologists, linguists, mathematicians and programmers meet at the edge of their disciplines to study texts with the help of modern computer methods, to create a common metalanguage and to learn speaking it.
265 applications with motivation letters, where applicants explained they will to participate in the School, were made. “We chose 40 – unfortunately, it was not possible to take more. There are students from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Perm, Tartu, Tula. The choice was made easily – on basis of how integrated the person is into the topic. Since the technology has developed, accurate methods in linguistic are developing all over the world – in Europe, USA, Australia. It is happening here, as well, but a bit discretely. One more important task of our School was also social – to meet, make contacts and create a professional context, our own environment to continue working in it”, explained Anastasia.
Teachers
Philologists, linguists and translators are among the teachers of Summer School.
Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya – School organizer, teacher of Higher School of Economics, Tartu Laboratory (Best Teacher of 2014, 2016), theory of language and computer linguistics expert.
Roman Leibov, teacher of the Tartu University, Mikhail Lotman’s student, studies Russian literature, specializes in Tyutchev works, one of the Russian internet pioneers. Professional interests include: internet sphere of humanities, post-folklore.
Maiya Stravinskaya – creative director of “Rambler Infographics” Studio, involved in a new sphere of journalism – web-documentation, which unites different types of information in one interactive multimedia project.
Oleg Sobchuk and Artem Shelya – translators of “Distant Reading” – a “linguistic bestseller” by Franco Moretti, which tells about ways and methods required to study literary macroprocesses.
Daniil Skorinkin – developmental linguistic engineer of ABBYY Company – master degree student of Higher School of Economics, involved in applied computer linguistics – semantic and syntactic text analysis, tries to learn computers understand people’s language better.
Topics
Four eventful days were filled with Digital Humanities lectures and practical work together with teachers.
Lectures were dedicated to the main topics of modern digital philology: “How and Why Do We Measure Culture Memory?”, “Cultural Evolution and Distant Reading: New Theory for New Methods”, “What is an Academic Publication in Digital Era”, “Network Analysis of Fiction Texts”, “Text Visualization as a Method: Infographics Research Opportunities”.
Practical work (tutorials) – were more “down to earth” – here, the participants were taught to work with texts on the modern level. Students tried to check M.L. Gasparov’s conclusions about Russian poetic forms of 18-20th centuries development, using analytic methods during a seminar named “Literary Experts Vs. Robots”. Seminar “Social Networks of Classical Works: Building Social Networks According to Classics” showed that although characters of classic novels did not add each other as friends on Facebook, they still had their “offline social networks”. In the framework of “naive poetry” tutorial, a “people’s poetic portal” stihi.ru was be analyzed on basis of thematic modelling algorithms. The range of questions discussed at the seminar is really wide - from “Is Building a Motive Analysis of the Russian Speech on Basis of Vector Semantic Model Possible?” to “Why “Horse” and “Steed” Mean Almost the Same in Spoken, But not in Poetic Language?”
Maybe the organizers had not set such a professional task, but all of this makes one, who is not a professional, think that the first Moscow-Tartu School of Digital Humanities aims at not only solving special purpose tasks, but also common tasks like “dragging” classic works on board the digital ship for our grandgrand-grandchildren to have an opportunity to enjoy classic works in their future, so far away from classicism.
Summarizing the results, Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya said that all the participants are very inspired: “I hope it pushes them to develop this topic”.
Tartu-Moscow (Moscow-Tartu) semiotic school is a movement in semiotics and Soviet humanities of 1960s. The School united scientists from Tartu (Department of the Russian Language of Tartu University), Moscow, Yerevan, Riga, Vilnius and other cities. The center point of the Semiotics School were problems of language and culture, constituting a system, consisting of “binary oppositions” with its special “universal code”. 
