Scientists in the Faculty of Philology and staff of the TSU Research Library are creating an electronic encyclopedia “The Verbal Culture of Siberia”. In it, researchers plan to collect artistic, journalistic, and scientific texts about the Siberian region.
In the pilot version of the encyclopedia, the results of studies of the social and cultural specifics of Siberia on the basis of analysis of Siberian literature, records of folklore, and colloquial speech of Siberians will be reflected in popular scientific and hypertext form for the first time. The encyclopedia will include archival, expeditionary, and Siberian and central Russian materials extracted from periodicals for the first time. Articles will contain references to digitized documents, the originals of which are stored in the funds of the Research Library.
- The encyclopedia will present absolutely unique materials related to the identity and the external openness of the region. As a result, we expect to understand the prospects, costs, and risks of developing and launching a full-scale project of the electronic encyclopedia “The Verbal Culture of Siberia”, - says Irina Aizikova, professor at the Faculty of Philology.
A pilot version of the encyclopedia will be published on the website of the Research Library. The section devoted to literature will include, for example, articles about the notebook of Nikolai Naumov, the eldest son of the Tomsk folk writer, about the concept “Siberian Fair” in the Russian public discourse, on the reclaiming and development of Siberia, and about the image of the Siberian writer in the literary criticism of the regional people.
The second section of the encyclopedia will be devoted to intercultural relations and relationships. It will contain articles by TSU scientists about how Western European and American culture was displayed in Siberian periodicals of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The texts about William Shakespeare, Gerhart Hauptmann, and other authors are already ready.
Another column will talk about the publishing processes taking place in Siberia, primarily in Tomsk. A separate section of the encyclopedia will include articles on the language and speech of the Siberians. Information will be published on the vocabularies of the speech of the Russian old-timers of Siberia, about the speech genre of the Siberian autobiographical story, about the concept “land” in the everyday verbal practices of the Siberian, about the Old Believers diary “The Island Chronicler”, and other topics.
- Although many of the texts are published, introduced into the scientific circulation, they are not always known to European or American researchers. Such resources as our encyclopedia will allow more people to access these documents, also with high-quality scientific commentary, - says Valerya Esipova, a project participant and the head of the study and disclosure department of the Fund of Manuscripts and Book Monuments Division of the TSU Research Library.