Project Update #1

[peterbussch]

During our first project meeting, we discussed the path to answering our research questions using the text of Stalin's letters. The general consensus of our group is that we're interested in the historical questions surrounding these letters, and will perform analysis with that goal in mind. Specifically, during the time period in which these letters were written, we have the marginalization of the Trotskyites, the beginning of the Terror, and the makings of pre-WWII Soviet Foreign Policy. Our goal is to find changes/trends within Stalin's letters which hint at these storylines in Soviet history. Since the whole corpus of letters is too large to make use of every single one, we decided to spend this week doing some basic structural markup and then splitting up the letters in order to analyze them for their utility. This initial task doesn't involve any knowledge of Russian, since it involves identifying the pieces of non-language structure which underpin the document. During our meeting, Dr. Pickett shared some tips for starting the process of structural markup for our corpus of letters.