Workshop “Between Text and Image: Postcards as a Source and Object of Digital Analysis”

About this publication

The E. M. Primakov Center hosted a meeting with our guest from Nizhny Novgorod, sociologist Timur Maratovich Khusyainov from the HSE University campus, who spoke about an interesting interdisciplinary project — the “Pishu Tebe” (“Writing to You”) digital corpus of postcards.

Surprisingly, the project focuses not on the images on postcards, but on the short texts written on them — messages sent by different people at different times. It immediately brought to mind the conciseness of ancient epigraphy... But the project is about something else!

The project team studies how text and image interact, the language of these messages from linguistic and semiotic perspectives, and the distinctive features of different types of messages: those addressed to children, written by children, written by men or women, and so on. It is a fascinating combination of history, sociology, linguistics, programming, geography, and much more.

A significant part of the corpus is already available on the project’s website, while interested researchers can request full access by contacting the project team.