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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.

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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.

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Recently, the relationship between migration and information and communication technologies (ICTs) has become one of the key fields of migration scholarship. The widespread use of mobile devices, messaging applications, and social media has significantly transformed the ways in which social ties are maintained across spatial and temporal distances, making communication almost continuous and instantaneous. In this context, it is particularly important to analyse the role of ICT-mediated communication in the creation of ethno-migrant communities, including digital diasporas as a new form of sociality.

In the academic literature, the phenomenon of digital diasporas and platform mediated communication is discussed as both a theoretical and a practical issue. On the one hand, it allows for a rethinking of classical understandings of diasporas, community boundaries, and mechanisms of solidarity by illustrating how online communities contribute to the creation, maintenance, and reproduction of diasporic ties. On the other hand, such communities play a practical role in migrants’ everyday lives by providing access to information, mutual assistance, and economic and social resources. Their impact, however, is ambivalent, as digital diasporas may both facilitate adaptation in the host society and reinforce closure within migrants’ own networks.

In the proposed presentation, I examine the role of online communities, specifically group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram, in the formation and reproduction of diasporas and migrant infrustructure, using the case of migrants from Central Asian countries in Russia. The empirical basis consists of in-depth interviews conducted in 2023–2024. The qualitative analysis shows that group chats on messaging platforms constitute a key infrastructure of both digital and offline diasporas. The study identifies several types of such communities, including former classmates’ chats, hometown-based (zemlyachestvo) chats, chats organised by diasporic and ethno-cultural associations, professional and workplace groups, “noticeboard” chats, financial mutual-aid groups (known as chёрnaya kassa), informal friendship-based chats, as well as family chats.

The characteristics of these communities, patterns of communication within them, and their functions will be examined. Preliminary results suggest that these online communities play a crucial role in maintaining social ties, mobilising mutual assistance, and coordinating everyday practices in migration, thereby shaping dense translocal and transnational networks.

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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.