Collaboration with “Prozhito: Center for the Study of Ego-Document”

The READ-IT team is pleased to announce a new cooperation with the “Prozhito: Center for the Study of Ego-Document” of the European University at St. Petersburg.

Launched in 2014 as an independent project, Prozhito was initially devoted to creating a digital database of personal diaries in Russian from the late 18^th century to nowadays. In 2019, “Prozhito: Center for the Study of Ego-Documents” was founded at the European University at St. Petersburg. The center’s main objective is to build a digital archive of ego-documents, including diaries, journals, memoirs, autobiographies, and personal correspondence.

The database includes both published diaries as well as manuscript diaries discovered by the Prozhito team. It is interested in all Russian/Soviet/post-Soviet diaries, regardless of the age and social origins of the author, and offers scholars and readers the ability not only to read individual diaries but also to search and work with an entire corpus of texts. At present, Prozhito’s bibliography consists of more than 4,000 diaries, and the online database includes more than 2,300 of these texts (a total of 530,000 diary entries).

We wish to thank the director of “Prozhito,” Mikhail Melnichenko, and his team for giving READ-IT the opportunity to work with its database.