Study of diaries and notebooks
The
project is devoted to the research work of diary texts in Russian tradition and
worldwide.
The task of the work is to study, describe and create an independent corpus of computerized diary texts, i.e. diaries, note-books, autobiographies, memoirs, letters, which are called 'everyday literature' or 'ego-texts'. So it is necessary to work out the typology of genres for such texts. Nowadays, the study of diary texts is conducted by methods of linguistic and literature analyses but they may attract attention of psychologists, medical workers, neurophysiologists and biologists.
It seems important to show the difference between this sort of literature and fiction texts on the one hand and everyday communication texts on the other hand, and also differentiate between diary texts and scientific texts which means the necessity to identify the diary genre among closely related genres. The characteristic features of different micro genres among diary texts and historical changes that took place in Russian tradition of keeping a diary should also be shown.
It is necessary to classify all types of Russian diary texts dating at least from the 17th century and up to now. We should establish all the necessary and sufficient conditions to classify the text as a diary and ascribe it to a special group inside diary texts: either to an everyday diary or to a daybook, different kinds of notes, workbooks, rough copies or memoirs, letters.
There is a special task to discover and describe the elements of language and style (lexemes, syntactic constructions, phraseology, tropes, metatext notes and so on) typical of a diary text as a whole or for its micro genres.
Russian diaries, memoirs and autobiographies are being published in the Internet at present http://uni-persona.srcc.msu.ru. The research group is planning to create a representative block of such documents in German, French, English, Dutch and other languages in order to cooperate with scientists of other countries and have a possibility of collaboration.