Abstract

The 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars forcibly relocated an entire population to Central Asia and Siberia, turning Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and adjacent regions into spaces of exile, labor, and community survival. Although many testimonies were recorded later, often after return to Crimea, they preserve detailed memories of Central Asia as a lived and remembered geography of displacement. These narratives connect Crimea and Central Asia through enduring social, institutional, and emotional landscapes, making them especially valuable for rethinking Central Eurasia through the intertwined lenses of space, society, and power.

Drawing on the author’s own corpus of oral history interviews with Crimean Tatars about exile in Central Asia, the paper compares human thematic coding with machine-assisted clustering and topic modeling. The analysis focuses on how each approach identifies and organizes references to space, movement, labor regimes, administrative structures, and interethnic relations. Particular attention is given to whether computational models privilege broad affective themes—such as suffering, survival, or resilience—at the expense of the more specific spatial and institutional dimensions of exile that human readers often recognize more readily.

Rather than treating digital tools as neutral instruments, the paper explores how methodological choices shape the visibility of place-based experience within narratives of forced displacement. It argues that computational approaches can help reveal larger patterns across testimonial corpora, but only when used with close attention to linguistic nuance, historical context, and regional specificity. In this sense, the paper contributes both to the study of Crimean Tatar deportation memory and to wider discussions about the possibilities and limits of digital methods in regional historical research.

By focusing on remembered Central Asia in Crimean Tatar testimony, the paper shows how digital analysis can be integrated into the study of deportation memory without losing sight of the historical and geographic textures that structure exile experience.