A seminar will take place titled “Quantitative Approaches to Historical Visual Culture – an Example of Soviet Newsreels”

On November 5 at 15:00 (EEST), the fourth seminar in the series organized by digitalhumanities.lv in collaboration with CLARIN-LV and DARIAH-EU will take place online, focusing on digital humanities and historical research. This time, the topic “Quantitative Approaches to Historical Visual Culture – an Example of Soviet Newsreels” will be presented by Adjunct Professor Mila Oiva. She says about the upcoming seminar: “In my talk I will discuss the potentialities and pitfalls of quantitative study of visual culture. Drawing on my and my colleagues' studies on Soviet newsreels from 1918 to 1992, I will exemplify uses of multidimensional vector embedding of images and Multimodal Large Languages Models for detecting long-term continuities and changes in historical audiovisual materials.”

Dr. Mila Oiva, Adjunct Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland, is an expert of Russian and Polish cultural history and digital research methods. Her research interests focus on the circulation of knowledge and changing perceptions of the world. She has explored these themes through a variety of case studies, ranging from 19th-century global news flows, Cold War-era transnational information circulation between Poland, the Soviet Union, and France, as well as contemporary Finnish and Russian internet forum discussions on medieval history. Her current research focuses on computational analysis of Soviet and Estonian newsreels.

The language of the seminar is English, and all interested participants are welcome to attend.

To receive the Zoom link, please register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/f72Ra9oBR8amlgEYvkIeIw

The seminar is organized within the framework of the project “Latvia’s 20th–21st Century History: Social Morphogenesis, Heritage and Challenges” (VPP-IZM-Vēsture-2023/1-0003) in collaboration with “Development of an Open and FAIR-Compliant Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia” (VPP-IZM-DH-2022/1-0002).