Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online: Socially-Engaged Digital Humanities
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put cultural heritage right in the line of fire. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is an online grassroots initiative of more than 1,500 volunteers which supports the digital preservation of Ukrainian culture. SUCHO started as an emergency web-archiving effort, preserving more than 50TB of cultural data from over 5,000 websites of Ukrainian museums, libraries and archives. In recent months SUCHO, has expanded its efforts to donating digitization hardware to Ukrainian institutions and creating online platforms for the preservation and exhibition of digitized and born-digital heritage. In this keynote, the three SUCHO co-founders and long-term volunteerswilldiscuss what it takes to turn remote volunteers into digital activists. Furthermore, the speakerswilloutline the crucial role Open Access plays for the digital preservation of culture in emergency scenarios such as wars and natural disasters.
This event is cosponsored with theFreeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
The presentation will take place at the èצӰ Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis in Wallenberg 433A.A Zoom link is available upon request from Center Manager, Jonathan Clark (jclark93 [at] stanford.edu (jclark93[at]stanford[dot]edu)).
About the Speakers
Quinn Dombrowskiis the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at èצӰ. Prior to coming to èצӰ in 2018, Quinn’s many DH adventures included supporting the high-performance computing cluster at UC Berkeley, running the DiRT tool directory with support from the Mellon Foundation, writing books on Drupal for Humanists and University of Chicago library graffiti.Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since coming to èצӰ, Quinn has supported numerous non-English DH projects, taught courses on non-English DH, developed a tabletop roleplaying game to teach DH project management, explored trends in multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, and started the, a feminist DH pedagogy and research group focused on Ann M. Martin’s 90’s girls series “The Baby-Sitters Club”. Quinn is currently co-VP of thealong with Roopika Risam, and advocates for better support for DH in languages other than English.
Anna Kijasis the head ofat Tufts University. Her academic training includes master’s degrees in library and information science from Simmons College, music with a concentration in musicology from Tufts University, as well as a bachelor of arts in music literature and performance from Northeastern University. She is the co-founder of, an initiative focused on safeguarding and preserving the digital cultural heritage of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Sebastian Majstorovicadvises institutions and researchers on Digital History methods and multimedia storytelling and has a professional background in software development and media production.
Andreas Segerbergworks in Digital Preservation at ES Solutions and is a lecturer at University of Gothenburg in archival science.