Latin — the alphabet of my soul

A group of Belarusian bloggers recently celebrated the “Week of the Belarusian Latin alphabet”. This is already the third year in a row this occasion is marked by using the Belarusian variety of the Latin alphabet to write blog posts, comments or whatever one needs to put down on paper or hard disk.

The Latin alphabet has a long history in Belarus, and was used widely until approx. 1910, when the choice was made for Cyrillic, which is now the norm. Recently the Academy of Sciences established an official form of the Latin alphabet to be used when writing geographical names on international maps and official documents, but it is not used in the latter context, because the official organs find it technically difficult to use this alphabet on their computers.

Adherents of the Latin alphabet claim that it is genuinly Belarusian and linked to the souls of true Belarusian patriots. They suggest that the Week of the Belarusian Latin alphabet helps convince more people that this is true.

How many Internet users in Belarus

Establishing the number of Internet users in a specific country will always be a difficult task. Finding ways to compare the level of Internet use between countries even harder, as statistics are often based on conflicting criteria in different countries. This has been the case for Belarus, where the number of Internet users was reduced by 3 mln from 2007 to 2008, which amounted to a reduction of more than 50% of the total number. The reason was simply that the statistics for 2007 had been completely wrong. The Ministry of Statistics had based their statistics on the registered number of users in the capital Minsk, which was bound to give a wrong number as the difference between Minsk and the rest of the country in terms of technical development is huge.

The corrected figures for 2008 are 3,1 mln users, or a third of the population in the 10 mln country. This puts Belarus on par with Russia (45,2 mln users) in relative numbers, but much higher than Ukraine (4,8 mln users), where only one in ten use the Internet, according to statistics by the International Telecommunication Union. Given the uncertainty related to these numbers one could expect the actual figures for Ukraine to be higher.

Equal Rights for Sarcasm

Some clever guys in the US have devised something what they call a new punctuation mark (sic!). SarcMark is meant to “emphasize a sarcastic phrase, sentence or message”.
The mark is hardly going to have any success, but it has triggered a very interesting discussion on the LanguageLog (see comments for different ways of expressing sarcasm, link to a nice commentary by Geoff Nunberg and other interesting stuff).
I personally cannot help but ~admire~ the valiant breach of at least two communication principles: first, marking sarcasm so explicitly seems to be somewhat opposite to the idea of sarcasm; second, paying for a language unit/device is very opposite to the idea of language itself.

Multimedia New Year’s Presents @ Openspace

snapshots from openspace new year’s presents

By way of a belated happy new year’s wish for us/the FoR team, I’d like to recommend all of us – and others who read this – to have a look at openspace.ru’s delightful online new year’s greetings. They are worth a peep both for scholarly reasons and purely for the fun of it.

Openspace editor-in-chief Mariia Stepanova wishes users an inspiring year in a multimedia rather than textual editorial. Interesting in itself, her video is a mere introduction to a whole range of multimedia “new-year’s presents,” all custom-made for the site. Together they take you on a journey through the fine de fleur of contemporary Russian art, theatre, literature, (animation) film, and (classical and modern/pop) music. Think a wintery video by internationally renowned artist Olga Chernysheva, a live registration of (fragments of) a poem read by Dmitrii Vodennikov, a music-cum-video remix by DJ Andrei Panin… and there is much, much more online creativity out there.

In other words, recommended – either as an academic exploration of shifts in Russian media-production practices, or to merely extend that holiday feeling.

2nd RU/UKR New-Media Project in Bergen

In 2010, the Future of Russian project will welcome a younger sibling: yours truly received HERA funding for a three-year project on memory debates in Russian and Ukrainian new media. The project is part of a larger project, led by Dr Alexander Etkind from the U of Cambridge, which will focus on the ongoing “memory war” between Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Memory at War – as the project is called – explores how, in these countries, political conflicts take the shape of heated debates about the recent past, and especially World War II and Soviet socialism.

As you may understand from the above, the project at large does not focus on new media per se. It is a trans-institutional endeavor in which the Universities of Cambridge, Helsinki, Tartu, Groningen, and Bergen cooperate to scrutinize Eastern Europe’s memory wars from varying angles. The Bergen team focuses on its outlines in new media – and in social media in particular.

In Russian and Ukrainian blogging communities, and in social media such as vkontakte or odnoklassniki, the recent past is as alive and kicking as if it never ended. How, in these media, do new technologies alter public and private commemorative discourse, in other words, the language of memory? That question is central to the Bergen project, titled Web Wars: Digital Diasporas and the Language of Memory. Web Wars will be coordinated by me, but executed by a parttime postdoctoral research assistant. We plan to recruit that assistant next Spring, so spread the word if you know anyone who might be interested in the job. Activities include the organization of an international conference and the production of a documentary film with Dutch filmmaker Maartje Gerretsen.

The findings of the Future of Russian team will naturally be pivotal to this new digital-media project – but possibly the information flow will work the other way as well: after all, Web Wars has language culture as a focus, too.

Online: Digital Icons 2. Social Networks on RuNet

The structure, taxonomy, function, and significance of social networks on the Russian Internet: that is the topic of the issue 2 of Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media. Digital Icons, previously The Russian Cyberspace Journal, recently changed its name to reflect a widened geographic scope and an increasingly complex media orientation.

Digital Icons it is, then. Titled “From Comrades to Classmates: Social Networks on the Russian Internet,” issue 2 was launched this week and is fully accessible online. A tip of the veil: the contributors consider the role of social media in contemporary Russia, with a special eye for the paradoxical stereotypes of Russian society — as collectivistic on the one hand, and amorphous and apathetic on the other. They determine, too, the role of social networks in maintaining Russia’s regional integrity by binding together the widely dispersed Russian-speaking diaspora. They do so in statistically (Alexanyan) and psychoanalytically (Mikheeva) oriented analyses of the Russian blogosphere, in articles on political and ethnographic identity-building on RuNet (MacLeod, Suleymanova, Katsbert), on online Russian libraries (Mjor), and in explorations of the specifities of Russian as opposed to global social networks (Golynko-Volfson).

Together with three reviews of recent RuNet-related publications, the articles make for a lavish discussion of Russian social media. Enjoy.

Russian humour

With our F2 conference on “Play” coming up in January a general update on Russian humour — outside of its new technology context — could be useful. Two recent books for this (and other) purpose(s): the edited volume: Olga Mesropova & Seth Graham, eds. Uncensored?: Reinventing Humor and Satire in Post-Soviet Russia, Slavica 2008 and Seth Graham’s monograph on the Russian anekdot: Resonant Dissonance: The Russian Joke in Cultural Context, (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory), NUP 2009.

The edited volume offers contributions on Russian humor and satire in post-Soviet literature, jokes, film and TV, music and stand-up comedy. With a constant view to the role of humour, satire, jokes and irony in the Soviet society, the analysis of post-Soviet humor and satire, in the words of the editors “contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion both of how Russians have negotiated the effects of the post-Soviet transition and how today’s popular culture playfully “re-appropriates” Soviet history. (8)”

Graham’s book explores the Russian anekdot in its cultural context(s), with chapters on the genealogy of the word and the genre, its main functions, thematic clusters, the genre’s reflexivity (meta-jokes) and post-Soviet afterlife. The book makes delightful reading, not only because of all the funny examples (unfortunately, only in English translation). Happy reading!

Is linguistics harmful?

Our colleague Alexander Berdichevsky gave a very interesting interview to the Russian radio station Russkaia sluzba novostei. One of the topics raised in this interview was whether linguists can inflict harm on the development of a language. Some of you might have guessed Sasha’s answer already (the rest of you are welcome to download the interview…), but as interesting as the response itself is the reference to an ongoing public debate in Russia about the relationship between professional and lay linguistics. A key document in this debate is a paper given by professor Andrei A. Zalizniak “O professiona’noi i liubitel’skoi lingvistike”.

Interestingly, an adjacent debate has surfaced on the thread of comments to Dmitrii Medvedevs video blog. A linguist under the nick of Niva accusses the president, as well as premier minister Vladimir Putin, of giving in to the widespread notion that changes in the language are due to the meddling of linguists with the language:

Тем не менее не могу молчать, поскольку вижу в этом еще один момент непонимания между наукой и властью. Я имею в виду сказанную Вами фразу, приведшую меня и моих коллег в недоумение: «На одной из моих встреч с учителями ими было правильно замечено: “Хватит уже переставлять ударения в словах, надо заняться реальными проблемами, которых в нашей стране достаточно”». […] Сегодня кто-то в эфире задал В.В. Путину вопрос про йогурт, и очаровательная ведущая тут же припечатала это выражением «реформа языка» (кстати, неверным по своей сути). К клевете на науку мы начинаем, увы, привыкать. Дмитрий Анатольевич, лингвисты — не враги народа, а тоже граждане России и тоже имеют право на защиту чести и достоинства. Мы уже устали быть без вины виноватыми.

I believe the last word has not been said in this debate…

AAASS, Columbia Meet-and-Greet, CfP

Although the Future of Russian team had to miss some delegates at the AAASS 2009 conference, it was a more than fruitful event for the project, I would say. Next to panel sessions, the project group activities included a meet-and-greet with scholars from Columbia University’s New Modes of Communication project. They pointed our attention to their upcoming conference, which some of us – or other readers of this blog – may want to visit. The Etiology and Ecology of Post-Soviet Communication is hosted in May 2010 by Columbia’s Harriman Institute. The organizers – Eugene Gorny, Florian Toepfl, Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Alan Timberlake, and Guobin Yang – welcome panels on:

“the emergence and evolution of social networks; patterns of interlinking; the phenomenon of social contagion in online communications; political clustering in the blogosphere and beyond; public versus private identities; doublethink, cynicism, coded language; the emergence of opinion leaders in the blogosphere; freedom of the press on the internet; forms and degrees of censorship, online activism/social movements on the internet; dissenters and political activism; democracy to autocracy in the Russian internet.”

One-page abstracts can be sent to nmc.conference@gmail.com by February 1, 2010. For those who can’t make it: the conference culminates a one-year project which has its own wiki site. Worth a visit, not only for the contents proper, but also as a sample of a new type of scholarly platform — one which utilizes cutting-edge digital research tools to facilitate, among other online services, internal communication and a collective virtual biography. Next year, the site may include podcasts of the May conference presentations – or so Eugene Gorny and Florian Toepfl suggested during our meeting.

Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures: CfP

shadow mechanism, vlad kuntsman, 2006

On June 3-4, 2010, the University of Manchester hosts the two-day conference Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures: Feelings, Technologies, Politics.  Organized by Adi Kuntsman – the author of a recently published book on online hate speech – the event brings together contributions from an exciting blend of scholarly fields: sociology, for one, media and cultural studies, arts, politics and science, and technology studies. Submissions for papers or round-tables are welcomed before February 1, 2010. “How does affect work in on-line networks and digital assemblages?”  Is one of the questions participants could ponder. Or: “What kind of perceptions, sensations, affective movements and public feelings emerge in our highly mediated and digitalised environments? What is the cybertouch of war, violence, terror? What are the structures of feeling that operate in the digitalised everyday and computerised ordinary?”

With such keynote speakers as Patricia Clough and Athina Karatzogianni – authors of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology and The Politics of Cyberconflict, respectively - the event sounds more than promising for the scholar of new media, politics, and emotion. With Kuntsman as the initiator, it is bound to be of interest to academics who scrutinize the RuNet in particular, too.