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The core of this paper is a practice report from the field of science dissemination. Outreach activities are an important part of any research project nowadays, especially in projects aimed at public engagement (Ross 2012; Schreibman et al. 2017). Informing about the everyday life of science can also be of a more general nature and as such become a strategic tool used by associations, institutions, centres, research groups. Addressees range from the inner academic community to the interested public. In the Digital Humanities, personal Twitter accounts, individual or collective blogs and announcement platforms like the German H-Soz-Kult or the French Calenda complement each other. Science blogs in particular can bridge the gap between preliminary experiments and actual research publications, but they also contribute to the social noise in the academic world. The biggest player in this field is surely Hypotheses, the multilingual platform for humanities and social science research blogs (https://hypotheses.org/), which, according to their last published statistics, attracted 24,4 million visits in 2016 (https://hypotheses.org/hypotheses-statistics).
This talk will throw a glance at the situation in Russia, where different forms of outreach were created and sometimes reach bigger audiences than their Western equivalents. We will narrate the story of "Systemnyj Blok", which started as a Russian-language online journal popularising achievements and developments in the Digital Humanities and addressing an interested crowd from academics to laymen. 82,000 subscribers on VK (the Russian equivalent to Facebook) along with 36,000 on Facebook, 9,700 on Instagram and 5,400 on Telegram may speak for themselves (statistics as of June, 2021). (As these groups overlap, we have calculated the number down to an estimated minimum of 90,000 in total.) In the first year of its existence, "Systemnyj Blok" was shortlisted for the "Prosvetitel" Prize (literally "Enlightener"), arguably the biggest and most respectable Russian award for science popularisation.
"Systemnyj Blok" was founded in summer 2018 as a side project by Daniil Skorinkin (currently head of the Digital Humanities MA programme at HSE in Moscow) and Ilya Bulgakov (programming team lead at ABBYY). From the very beginning, they aimed at an audience significantly larger than the number of readers of an average research blog or an academic outlet, joining the example of "bloggers [which] explicitly write their posts for a lay audience" (Mahrt et al. 2014). Therefore they chose VK as a platform, the largest Russian social network, and started working on content that would be accessible to a general public. Prior to his career in research, Daniil Skorinkin gained 4 years of experience as a news writer/editor. Ilya Bulgakov already had experience with a successful launch of a previous project on VK (from 0 to 10,000 subscribers).
They started brainstorming about the name and general appearance of the outlet. Three meetings and five pizzas later, they came up with the name "Systemnyj Blok" ("Системный Блок" in Cyrillic). Literally, "Systemnyj Blok" simply refers to a computer case, but it also contains the name of a famous Russian poet, Alexander Blok (1880–1921), whom they adopted as their mascot. Shortly after, they came up with a logo that would convey the dualism of technology and poetry in a way that is very typical of VK culture.
A public page was created on VK (https://vk.com/sysblok) and a stockpile of materials for posting. They started with short posts: concise retellings of their own research results containing one or two illustrative graphics, description of digital archives, popular explanations of relevant terms like "n-gram", and summaries of interesting research papers. At the same time, they collaborated with existing pop-sci outlets active on VK to foster an initial readership. Soon they were posting 4 to 5 materials per week, a pace they still keep up at the moment, in June 2021. The average number of views for each post on VK is 12,958, the average number of likes is 138,5 (Median: 88).
From the very beginning, they aimed at growing a distributed team of volunteers to run Systemnyj Blok as a community enterprise. Early on, they started recruiting among their readers, friends and colleagues, who would join what they perceived as the "first ever Russian media at the intersection of culture and the digital". An application form for volunteers was made available in the first days after launch.
Today the same application form functions as the main entry point into the Systemnyj Blok team. As of June 2021, the team of authors, editors, designers, proofreaders, maintainers, and managers includes more than 90 people. They also had successful one-time collaborations with scholars and industry practitioners, who did not join the team, but wrote pieces of interest on their own research.
Currently SysBlok builds on
Day-to-day coordination is organised via Telegram. But the backbone of maintaining SysBlok are weekly Skype calls scheduled each Sunday without exception. A virtual meeting of the publishing/editorial team that schedules the postings for the upcoming week and assigns new tasks to the editors is followed by a smaller managerial call to discuss issues of HR, long-term planning and other organisational tasks. Each team has its own Trello board to assign tasks and monitor their completion.
From July 2018 to June 2021, Systemnyj Blok published about 800 original materials (counting all platforms). Among them summaries of articles from journals ("Digital Scholarship in the Humanities", "DH Quarterly", etc.) as well as conference proceedings (ADHO, ACL Anthology, among others), tutorials on web-scraping, topic modelling and regular expressions, popular explanation of research methods and technologies (from the simplest corpus management techniques to word2vec and FastText), own research and infographics (including collaborations with larger media outlets), lightweight reporting (down to the level of word clouds), translations from the "Companion to Digital Humanities" and popular DH bloggers such as Ted Underwood. They also experimented with non-conventional formats such as 'neural poetry': every week saw a new AI-generated poem, accompanied by a close reading of it by a philologist.
Up to today, Systemnyj Blok has no sponsors or earnings. They are a 100% volunteer enterprise with the declared goal of keeping it like that.