Digital Humanities North

The Foundation for Siberian Cultures is dedicated to maintaining cultural diversity in Siberia and the Russian Far East. The Foundation documents endangered languages, indigenous ecological knowledge and art and craft traditions. Taking into account political developments and using contemporary technologies, the Foundation for Siberian Cultures develops learning materials and web platforms for Indigenous communities in coproduction with local people. This supports their efforts to develop new multi-layered cultural expressions and identities on the basis of their own distinctive cultural traditions.

These goals are realized through publications in the organization's own publishing house, web presentations, research projects while also organizing workshops, seminars, and exhibitions.

In the annual reports the activities of the given year are summed up that appear consecutively under the heading News. This includes workshops at the Foundation for Siberian Cultures and conferences that representatives of the Foundation participated in. Ongoing and future projects are presented, as well as the Foundation’s new publications. Annual reports | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

The publishing director, Erich Kasten, is assisted by an editorial advisory board consisting of Stephan Dudeck, Michael Dürr, Gail Fondahl, Tjeerd de Graaf, Marjorie Mandelstam-­Balzer, Anna Sirina, Hans-Georg Soeffner and Hiroki Takakura. All scientific publications are peer-reviewed prior to publication.

The publications of the Foundation for Siberian Cultures and other documents are available on the portal in open access via the digital library, so that as many end user groups as possible can access research results and documentation.

The digital library’s principle of open access was adapted by Erich Kasten and Michael Dürr as early as 2004 for the web domain www.siberian-studies.org. This objective is pursued and enhanced at present by drawing on state-of-the-art technology. In relation to digital content, as a general rule, the Creative Commons licence is applicable (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). The Foundation’s list of publications can also be downloaded as a pdf-file.

Apart from its focus on the indigenous peoples of the North, the Foundation for Siberian Cultures also deals with historical and contemporary political discourse. A privileged theme in this respect is the life histories of people who have become victims of forced migration or deportation, especially publications ot the series Contemporary history that is linked to Russia and Eastern Europe. This concerns firstly the editing and publication of eyewitness accounts of survivors from the concentration camp in Ravensbrück in the chapter remembrances and life histories.

Recent activities:

• Establishment of a Research Partnership with the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) on Political Developments in Siberia since Perestroika (2025).
• Enhancement of the Research Partnership with the Hokkaido Museum for Northern Peoples and Tohoku University, Japan (October 2024).
• Research project on museum collections with indigenous communities from Siberia, resulting in a jointly created catalogue and a website.
• Workshop on Enhancing the Partnership between the Foundation for Siberian Cultures (FSC) and the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples (HMNP) (June 2023).
• Workshop on ethics in research relationships with indigenous communities in the Foundation for Siberain Cultures (July 2022).