Soviet literature is not only authors from the school curriculum, members of the Writers’ Union and winners of state prizes. Many books published during the Soviet years are now almost unremembered — and yet they shaped the literary landscape of the era. On our platform, modern readers and researchers can get acquainted with this «great unread».
What data is our resource based on?
«Book Chronicle» is the largest Russian bibliographic index. It records more than 6.5 million editions published since 1907 in the Russian Empire, RSFSR, USSR and Russia.
There is an electronic catalog of the Book Chronicle, prepared by the Russian Bibliographic Society. Most of the digitized issues of the index for the period 1917-2017 are stored there. But not all researchers of Soviet literature and culture know about the existence of this resource.
Our database is based on the recognized texts from this electronic resource. From the entire array of data on the book market, we decided to focus on fiction and children’s literature.
What can we learn about Soviet books thanks to the «Map of Soviet Literature»?
Our «map» not only reflects the geography of Soviet book publishing, which was concentrated in Moscow and Leningrad, but also recreates the structure of connections between authors and publishing houses, the dynamics of circulation and prices of Soviet books, the gender ratio of writers, genre affiliation of publications, and much more.
How to make a «Map of Soviet Literature»?
- Study the electronic resource «Book Chronicle».
- Gather an interested team.
- Proofread the recognized texts.
- Develop an algorithm for marking up bibliographic records.
- Subtract the resulting markup.
- Visualize the resulting data.
Who are we?
We are a group of master’s and master’s students from the Faculty of Humanities of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. We are interested in Soviet literature and big data.Our team was formed thanks to the «Scientific Initiative» competition. You can learn more about us in the «Team» section.
How to contact us?
Tell us your ideas, share similar projects and join the team. You can do all this at sovlitmap@yandex.by.
We look forward to your emails!