Digital Icons - our journal formerly known as Russian Cyberspace - is doing well.

Remember my earlier post about the new research project "Web Wars: Digital Diasporas and the Language of Memory"? The project will soon officially kick off, and we are now inviting applications for a Researcher position at the University of Bergen. This will be a two-year parttime position (50%) which starts June 1, 2010.

Four mini-mini-reviews of recent and upcoming publications which scrutinize the RuNet from various disciplinary angles.

    Pamiatnik klaviature; fragment of a comic strip after a BOR quotation (both from FoR site).

A post on unsolved riddles, pending questions, and unanswerable queries.First of all, simmons_fan asked me in a comment about the following:"Моя коллега по исследованию российской блогосферы ищет одну статью. Она её описывает следующим образом: 'All I know is vague - that it is a study on the Internet, and FSB involvement, and how the FSB works to distract/disorganize etc online content. It was written in the early 2000's (like 2002) and has 3 authors. The person who was telling me about it referred to the article as an example of how the FSB has people who, for instance, add all sorts of "flames" or tdistracting comments to political articles in order to distract the conversation from important issues etc.'" (simmons_fan, your link makes me wonder whether your colleague is perhaps Karina Alexanyan?)I can't say I haven't tried. I asked colleagues, googled my head off, but all I can come up with is this podcast with three 'authors' - Linor Goralik, Vlad Strukov, and Olia Lialina - including, among other topics, a discussion 'On Internet control, censorship, copyright and child protection'. Interesting, yes, but surely this is not the article that your colleague is looking for, simmons_fan? Does one of our readers have a clue, perhaps?Secondly, two of my students are drafting plans for exciting essays, on topics which have been explored substantially less extensively than, say, populist motifs in Lev Tolstoy's work. The first is on Russian flash animation, the second on Russian virtual museums (in the broad sense - think Memorial's Virtual Gulag Museum, but also websites like madeinussr.com, which we discussed earlier). This is not the place to enter into the specificities of the essays. This is the place, though, to ask potential specialists for useful sources. As a literary-cum-cultural-studies scholar, I am familiar with some writings on flash animation (by Maevski & Borodkin, for instance, and by Vlad Strukov, whom I just mentioned and who is one of our RC colleagues), but I don't have an overview of the field. The same goes for the digital museums: there is Museums and the Web by Bowen, Bennett & Johnson (1998), there is a useful online article by Takashi et al. - but what else? And what is there specifically on Russian museums and the web? Which first-rate sources are we overlooking? Ideas, comments, suggestions - all are warmly welcomed.ER

Is the Internet in Russia a political factor of 'real' significance? Or do the countless websites, journals, and blogs simulate rather than stimulate political activity and decision making? These and related questions are central in the brand new first issue of The Russian Cyberspace Journal: Virtual Power. Russian Politics and the Internet. The issue was launched this week and is fully accessible online.As the name suggests, the journal is a kin of this blog - it is published by a team of scholars which partly overlaps with this ZhZh team. In Virtual Power, they and other international specialists explore the representation and mediation of Russian political discourse - with special attention for last year's most significant political events: the presidential elections and the Georgia-Ossetia conflict. Now before turning to the contents, let me stress that we are keen on discussing these with colleagues and interested readers in this blog. Feel free to add critical comments: tell us what you like, what you miss, which questions the articles stir, with which assertions you agree, with which you don't - and if so, why you do or don't. For this first issue, we are especially keen on peeping in our readers' minds.So, what can you expect between the two virtual covers of this first journal issue? Some teasers, with links that bring you to the right articles with one mouse click. The emphasis of the issue is on social networks and participatory digital platforms - think blogs, or chatfora (Rutten, Schmidt, Goroshko/Zhigalina, Fossato). Several authors make a distinction between official media and unofficial, digitally enhanced networks (Schmidt, Strukov), and between the presentation of political events on the state-controlled television and their mediation on oppositional web sites (Lapina-Kratasiuk, Sokolova).Other contributors analyse how the Internet - that allegedly neutral, transnational medium - is used to disseminate national imagery and expressing national sensibility (Strukov, Hofmann). The issue reaches beyond the borders of the Russian Federation in analyses that consider the cases of Belarus (Krivolap) and Ukraine (Hofmann), and that position the new media developments in post-Soviet space in relation to a wider axis of what was once deemed the Second World (Saunders).Maybe you never reached this conclusion, and you are now deeply immersed in one of the articles to which the above links can take you. But in case you're still there: we hope that you'll enjoy our discussion of virtual power - and we heartily encourage you to join it here. ER

Now that issue 1 is online, we at The Russian Cyberspace Journal are keen on compiling material for our next issue. Do you have a scholarly interest in social-networking practices? With a special focus on the RuNet? Do consider the below call for papers for the RC journal, issue 2. We are a peer-reviewed journal and our first journal has been avidly visited in the past weeks - in other words, thorough feedback and a wide audience would be guaranteed. Questions about the CFP are welcome here in the blog. ERCALL FOR PAPERSThe Russian Cyberspace Journal, issue 2: 'From Comrades to Classmates: Social Networks on the Russian Internet' Deadline: 1 July, 2009At the beginning of 2009, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation had approximately 150,00 members, while there were over 20 million users of odnoklassniki.ru, a social networking site for former "classmates." Russia's dominant political party, "United Russia," commands some 2 million members; however this pales in comparison to the 18 million active members of the popular networking platform Vkontakte.ru. While political activity in party organizations is certainly different from the spontaneous, informal, and often apolitical participation in social networks on the web, these comparisons demand inspection. Over the coming decade, sociologists predict a general shift from formal to informal organization of social groups and communities. Undoubtedly, this shift will be shaped by contemporary networking technologies. The Russian Cyberspace Journal, issue 2, aims to examine the structure, taxonomy, function, and significance of social networks on the Russian Internet. What role do these new web-based forms of socializing play in contemporary Russia, particularly given the paradoxical stereotypes of Russian society as collectivistic on the one hand, and amorphous and apathetic on the other? Does social networking in Russia represent a cultural form specific to post-Soviet Russia, or is it only an unreconstructed and uncritical adaptation of "Western" net practices?For 'From Comrades to Classmates', we seek contributions that approach social networks as a critical component of politics, society, culture, education, and economics. We are interested in exploring a number of questions, including: Have new social networks replicated and/or replaced Soviet traditions of social mobilisation? What is the role of social networks in maintaining Russia's regional integrity and binding together the widely-dispersed Russian- speaking diaspora? What can we learn about post-millennial everyday practices-dating, business associations, public relations-from the operation of Russian social networks?For more information, including guidelines and contact information, please visit the CFP link on our website.

   images from Olga Lialina's Anna Karenina project (discussed by Vlad Strukov in the kultura issue in question)Henrike Schmidt has already blogged about the German version, but since yesterday the English version is available as well: 'Notes From the Virtual Underground. Russian Literature and the Internet', the first 2009 issue of the online journal of Russian cultural life kultura, is now online, available in full-text format for free. Conceived by the Russian Cyberspace team, 'Notes From the Virtual Underground' is a thematic kultura issue focusing entirely on the production and consumption of Russian literature on the Internet. As Henrike wrote, it complements the contents of our own first journal, 'Virtual Power: Russian Politics and the Internet', with explorations of the cultural and literary spheres - think analyses of electronic libraries (Schmidt), of deconstructions of the literary canon in net art (Strukov), the specificities of Russian literary blogs (Rutten), and interviews with Pavel Protasov and Aleksandr Kabanov, on copyright issues and local Internet mythologies, respectively.In her entry Henrike also pointed out the links between this and earlier kultura issues, which zoomed in on Russian libraries and the nexus between Russian language and social change, among other topics. For those interested in the latter, I would like to add another link, to Landslide of the Norm, the Bergen-based research project on interrelations between Russian linguistic liberalisation and literary development in - mainly - the post-Soviet period. Not only was Landslide of the Norm the forerunner of the emphatically new-media oriented research project The Future of Russian: Language Culture in the Era of New Technology (in which yours truly is involved since March 1, and about which you'll hear more in this blog in the future) - but the Landslide team itself also devoted considerable attention to the question how linguistic identity and linguistic norms are performed online. If you want to know more, have a look not just at the site, but also at the ensuing book publication, Landslide of the Norm: Language Culture in Post-Soviet Russia. (Lunde & Roesen, eds., Bergen 2006). The 'Landsliders' are currently preparing another book, on post-Soviet (linguistic) norm negotiations, which will contain additional RuNet-related material. We'll keep you updated, ofcourse; but for the moment, that publication is still in the making.ER

 ...and it has beaches, too Did you buy your agenda for next year already? In September 2010, the University of St Andrews will host a conference on 21st-Century European Literature. 'Mapping New Trends' - that is what the organizers hope to do, together with speakers specializing in any contemporary European literature, including Russian.I won't repeat the entire call for papers: you can easily find that elsewhere. Here it suffices to know that papers about 'Blosphere Narratives (Between Essay and Fiction)' are warmly welcomed. Now it may be my increasingly WWW-oriented mind, but it surprises me that an academic gathering on new literary trends only devotes one out of 26 possible topics to a digital development. Or have digital practices become so intrinsically embedded in contemporary culture that there is no need to point them out separately? Surely the web is bound to pop up in sessions devoted to, say, 'Diasporic identities,' 'New takes on old genres,' or 'Archiving and memorialising the past'?Digital or not, the conference is collecting proposals for individual papers or panels between now and September 1. Anyone longing to share thoughts on 'what is new, right now, in the national literature you research; what patterns are already discernable, what clusters of texts exploring common themes, ethical or aesthetic imperatives, theoretical or generic preoccupations, can be identified in the new millenium' - write the Russian-literature convenor and prepare yourself for Scottish autumn days.ER