2021.01.09 Does the timing of this news item suggest a New Year Resolution to "update your website more often"? In the past two years, I've continued presenting, as COVID-19 permitted, at ASEEES, AATSEEL, and Plotting Poetry, as well as at the 2019 conference of the Aleksanteri Institute. I also celebrated a small promotion on my project at Novetta to Senior Open Source Analyst. Most importantly, I completed Advent of Code for the second time in 2020. As far as engagements for the year ahead, I anticipate a couple more career panels, finding the will to contribute to area studies conferences as usual, and investing in additional ways to have interesting conversations with the expert community.
2018.12.06-2018.12.09 ASEEES 2018 goes into the books as a success. I enjoyed presenting on David J. Birnbaum's and my reflections on visualizing prosody and learning from many others about the state of Russian media and new media today. I also learned quite a lot about the thought and resources ASEEES is putting into helping young scholars orient toward jobs outside of academia -- definitely check for their programming on this subject during conferences and check out the "Exploring Career Diversity" interviews in the meantime, if this kind of move is of interest to you.
2018.11.29-2018.12.01 I was enormously glad for the opportunity to contribute to the International Forum of Young Researchers in Soviet and Post-Soviet History and Culture at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Not only did I receive valuable feedback on my work on Selvinsky, I learned so much about the process of research from several research projects which, even when presented at relatively early stages of interpretation, were incredibly thoughtful and thought-provoking.
2018.09.12-2018.09.14 "Plotting Poetry II: Bringing Deep Learning to Computational Poetry Analysis" really drove home for me the effectiveness and potential of deep learning even on small corpora like poetry. I really enjoyed seeing the progress so many made since Plotting Poetry I in Basel!
2018.08.13 Recently, my colleagues and I wrote up the process behind a small report and infographic for Novetta. Check out that blog post and other recent write-ups of our work in Novetta Mission Analytics.
2018.04.30-2018.05.05 I presented at the Russian Film Symposium. What a pleasure to share the Symposium's 20th anniversary with top Russian critics, the incredibly smart and generous organizing committee, and other long-standing friends of the Symposium.
2018.02.09 On a visit to the University of Pittsburgh, I introduced our long-standing project "Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme," introducing real, if limited, results of algorithmic reading for the first time! I also met with awesome students affiliated with the Center for Russian and East European Studies to talk about non-academic jobs. I hope I can have a hand in revealing their bright futures.
2018.02.03 At AATSEEL 2018, I presented "Ideal Readerly Communities on the Soviet Screen," addressing the cinematic search for a portrayable community for citizen readers in the Soviet Union. This was part of the "Reading in Russia" stream and a wonderful introduction to AATSEEL's new-ish stream format.
2017.12.02 In my leisure time this month, I am having a lot of fun and learning some new things at Advent of Code, for which my company Novetta is a sponsor. Don't look up my score (inevitably '0' in the AoC's scoring system :) ), but do go and solve some puzzles!
2017.11.11 In I think the final report on "Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme" for 2017, David J. Birnbaum and I spoke about the challenges of detecting and describing inexact or contingent rhyme at an overall very engaging ASEEES convention.
2017.10.06 David J. Birnbaum and I presented our progress in the computational detection and characterization of Russian rhyme at Machiner la poésie/Plotting poetry at the University of Basel.
2017.02.05 I presented "Imagined Community in Konstantin Simonov's 1930s War Poetry," about Simonov's impressions of the Spanish Civil War and the Manchurian War, at AATSEEL in San Francisco. It was great to see everyone there!
2017.01.17 Lots of exciting, though slightly less public, open source research going on at Novetta. Give me a ping to talk about it.
2016.05.06 In connection with the Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium, I presented a response to Zhora Kryzhovnikov's Gor'ko! 2.
2016.04.30 I received my Doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh. Excelsior!
2016.03.18 I successfully defended my dissertation, "Territory and Empire in Early Soviet Poetry."
2016.02.17 I presented the lecture "Shared Time and Imagined Community: Celebrating the Feat of the Cheliuskin in Verse Works" to the Department of World Languages and Cultures of Mercyhurst University
2016.01.27 The Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh hosted my lecture, "Shared Time and Imagined Community: Celebrating the Feat of the Cheliuskin in Verse Works."
2016.01.08 I present the paper "Classical Allusions and the Specter of Empire in Vladimir Maiakovskii's Pro eto" at the national conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in Austin.
2015.12.16 The world tour of Meter, rhythm, and rhyme has not yet ended, as David J. Birnbaum takes the project to Prague and presents to the Versification Research Group at the Institute of Czech Literature AS CR (Versologický temý Ústavu pro českou literaturu AV ČR).
2015.10.23 I present "Force of Habit: Modes of Time in Verse Works on the Cheliuskin Saga" to students and faculty of the Russian and Post-Soviet Studies program at the College of William & Mary.
2015.09.26 Meter, rhythm, and rhyme is still going strong on the 2015 conference circuit at the Digital Humanities Forum 2015 at the University of Kansas.
2015.08.11 Meter, rhythm, and rhyme continues its world tour at the Balisage Markup Conference. There, David J. Birnbaum presented the ways in which verse organization challenges XML hierarchies, and the ways we can infer verse structures from well-formed XML.
2015.06.27 Meter, rhythm, and rhyme is in Sydney for DH2015: Global Digital Humanities! David J. Birnbaum will be presenting our work on using computational methods to describe the formal features of Russian-language poetry. David is also co-running a workshop on CollateX (abstract), an important tool for comparing witnesses in digital scholarly editions of texts.
2015.06.16. This site is launched.