Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia

Antonina is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College. Prior to joining DDH, she was an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at ITMO University, Saint-Petersburg, Russia, where she launched and led a Digital Humanities Center. She gained her PhD in 2016 from Saint-Petersburg State University, and was a Willard McCarty’s Fellow at King’s College in 2018-2019. She was endorsed by the British Academy as a promising academic in 2022. Her research and pedagogy take place at the intersection of cultural history, spatial humanities, cultural heritage, and digital humanities.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Cultural heritage data representation
• Cultural heritage data visualisation
• Spatial humanities
• Digital public humanities

Antonina’s research focuses on how technical processes have shaped the field of Humanities at the forefront of conceptualising and analysing its sources as data. As a cultural historian and a DH scholar, she began with analysing perceptions of ‘where-ness’ and landscapes of experience by revisiting notions of space and place through interdisciplinary lenses of spatial humanities. More recently, being largely engaged with the GLAM sector she has started to explore (in)visibility of cultural data and approaches to its representation. 

Antonina welcomes PhD applications related to the above, ideally from those interested in digital public humanities critique.

Selected publications

2022. “Digital Humanities and the Gulag Experience: The Case of Estonian Gulag Literature.” Memory Studies Meet Literary Studies. Voices and Practices From Eastern Europe in the 21st Century, Vernon Press (in press).

2022. “A Conversation on International Collaboration in Digital Scholarship”.The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Issue 21.

2021. Reading Race in Slavic Studies Scholarship through a Digital Lens. Slavic Review, 80(2), pp.234-244. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2021.78

2019. Named Entity Recognition for Russian Historical Texts. CSAI Proceedings 2019: 3rd International Conference on Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, pp.13-17. DOI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3374587.3374637

2018. RICH-CPL: Fact Extraction from Wikipedia-sized Corpora for Morphologically Rich Languages. Proceedings of the 23rd Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT, pp.78-84. DOI: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8588076

Teaching

Antonina has extensive teaching experience in various areas of digital humanities at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in and outside the UK. 

Expertise and public engagement

Antonina organised various conferences, symposia, open talks and free public events to support DH community building, including Lev Manovich’s public talk. She was invited to give keynote papers at Algorithms for Her? Conference, New York City DH week panel discussion, etc. She is actively participating in Princeton DH Slavic Group meetings. 

Projects

The Pages of Early Soviet Performance (PESP): Antonina took part in this collaborative project, which aims at using machine learning to transform Soviet performing arts periodicals into data.

What Do National Anthems Hide?: Antonina took part in this collaborative project, which aims at identifying the core characteristics outlined in national anthems.