I am so happy to become a fellow of another major European initiative on Russia’s war against Ukraine – a Leibniz Collaborative Excellence Project Documenting Russia’s war against Ukraine, also known as LivArch!
The fellowship is intended for Ukrainian scholars affiliated abroad. My own position adds another layer: a Polish scholar and a Ukrainian citizen experiencing this war firsthand. More challenging, but also more insightful. This ambivalent state of being both distanced and included echoes what Simmel called "the synthesis of near and far." Close enough to see what is happening; distant enough to study it.
Back when I was just starting my doctoral studies, LivArch's open-access resources were one of my entry points into this empirical world, feeding my work with firsthand testimonies and primary sources. Soon, I found my own empirical ground – public wartime diaries of civilians. I was impressed by the sheer number of such sources – hundreds, in fact – that had been published or shared online since 2022. And yet, I couldn’t find any systematic registry of such diaries – unlike multiple collections of other testimonies like interviews, short notes, oral stories, and others.
Having then started my qualitative study, I was discouraged by the lack – not to say absence – of methodological protocols to deal with such a massive corpus of highly dispersed and unstructured texts. Of course, there are small corpora of wartime diaries, as well as deep interpretive studies based on one or two sources – and no clue as to how to approach this huge body of literature as a corpus in sociological research.
This looked like a real gap, which I proposed to close with my project.
During the three-month scholarship period, I will work on the open-access online corpus inventory of public wartime diaries – both published in paper and continuously kept online. I will also submit a scholarly paper discussing the methodological challenges of creating such a corpus, equipping it with analytical tools, and ensuring its sustainability. Closer to the end of my scholarship period, I will give a talk at Herder University in Marburg and will give a post to the Herder Institute Blog.
This is a lot of work, and it goes far beyond the needs of my doctoral thesis – but I’m really eager to do it. Yet with the guidance and mentorship of the LivArch team – by far the most intensive out of all the grants I've ever received – I am sure to succeed.
My LivArch project description is here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19709376
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