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- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- History
Accepted papers
Abstract
Over the past two decades, Digital Humanities has become an established field within global humanities research, bringing computational methods and digital tools into the study of history, culture, and society. In Kyrgyzstan, however, the systematic use of digital methods in the humanities is a relatively recent development. This presentation offers an overview of the current state of Digital Humanities and digital history in Kyrgyzstan, with particular attention to academic teaching, research practices, and institutional initiatives.
Drawing on experiences from the American University of Central Asia (AUCA), the talk introduces the development of formal coursework in Digital Humanities, including the country’s first introductory course in the field and discusses how digital methods are integrated into disciplines such as history, anthropology, folklore studies, and Manas studies. The presentation also highlights selected projects, including the digital analysis of contemporary Manas narratives, digital mapping of historical and cultural heritage sites, and ongoing efforts to digitize manuscript and oral collections.
By situating these initiatives within broader international Digital Humanities debates, the presentation reflects on conceptual challenges, methodological choices, and future directions for digital scholarship in Kyrgyzstan, emphasizing the role of interdisciplinary collaboration and open-access digital resources.
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.
Abstract
Historians today operate in an environment where the volume of sources is rapidly expanding, and access to them is increasingly determined not by physical visits to archives but by the availability of digital infrastructure. The ability to quickly locate documents, compare data, and formulate new research hypotheses directly depends on how well archives are integrated into the information space. Thus, the way archives provide access to their holdings becomes a decisive factor for the advancement of historical scholarship.
Archives find themselves in a situation where the need for digitalization is evident, yet a unified infrastructure for access to documents has not been established. Despite the ongoing “E-Archive” project in Kazakhstan, in practice many archives are compelled to develop local solutions independently in order to provide researchers and society with information. This results in numerous fragmented systems, each functioning in isolation, but collectively demonstrating the determination of archives to move beyond their traditional role as custodians.
In Russia, for instance, by 2018 the number of state archive websites had tripled, yet more than 90 archives remained without their own resources, with their activities reflected only on ministerial websites. Kazakhstan shows a similar pattern: by 2021, 223 state archives and over 800 local bodies had been included in the “E-Archive” system, but a fully functioning unified search platform has not yet materialized. Currently system is working, but not fuctional as promised. Consequently, individual archives create their own websites and databases to work with.
The comparison of these facts reveals that the development of the archival sphere proceeds through parallel initiatives: state projects set the framework, but the actual work of ensuring access is carried out locally. For historians, this means that source retrieval requires familiarity with multiple isolated systems and platforms. The prospect lies in transitioning from fragmented practices to a unified access system, which would transform archives into a full-fledged element of the information infrastructure and provide researchers with documentary memory in digital form.
Abstract
This article investigates the application of OCR technology for the automatic recognition of manuscripts, using the Chagatai-language manuscript Shezhire-i Turki (“Genealogy of the Turks”) by Abulghazi Bahadur Khan as the research object. The process of converting text from PDF images into Word documents was carried out by engineers from Astana IT University, based on the electronic version preserved in the “National Corpus of the Kazakh Language” at the Institute of Linguistics named after Akhmet Baitursynov. During the study, the OCR-generated text was manually checked against the original PDF, errors were corrected, and the accuracy of graphical features and diacritical marks was evaluated. Comparative-historical, descriptive, and textological methods were applied.
The study aims to assess the effectiveness of OCR technology for automatically recognizing Chagatai manuscripts, determine the extent to which the extracted Arabic-script text differs from the original, and explore its potential applications in the humanities. The Chagatai language, with its complex structure, poses challenges for text analysis, orthographic standardization, and understanding historical forms. In this context, artificial intelligence and modern technologies facilitate manuscript digitization, enable textual analysis, and support the creation of linguistic databases, providing researchers with effective tools for working with historical texts. The results demonstrate that while OCR cannot always achieve full accuracy, it significantly enhances the efficiency of digital processing and can be widely applied in organizing texts and conducting linguistic analyses in humanities research.