Academic Research Fellowship Report - Julia Zimmerman
My Time at Trinity
I am immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to spend time at TRiSS and to be awarded its Academic Fellowship. Being part of Trinity’s vibrant research community provided the perfect environment to advance my project on the roots of revolution in Imperial Russia. I am especially thankful for the support I received from colleagues across the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy, who helped make this project possible.
The Project: Roots of Revolution – Mapping the Dynamics of Radicalization in Imperial Russia
In this co-authored project, I explore the social, economic, and political drivers of revolutionary radicalization in the European territories of the Russian Empire from the early nineteenth century to the 1910s. We examine how factors such as ethnicity, religion, gender, and geography shaped the rise of revolutionary movements—and how these movements spread far beyond Russia’s borders, influencing political struggles across Eastern and Western Europe. I place particular focus on the role of mass media, exile networks, and communication technologies in spreading radical ideologies, including Russian terrorism.
What the Project is Based On
With the support of the TRiSS Academic Fellowship, I digitized eleven volumes of collective biographies documenting the lives of thousands of activists persecuted by the Tsarist regime. Compiled by Soviet historians between 1927 and 1934, these biographies offer rich detail on activists’ social origins, ethnic backgrounds, occupations, education, political networks, and revolutionary activities. They also map connections between activists within Russia and exiles in European hubs such as London, Zurich, Geneva, and Berlin, allowing me to trace both local and transnational networks of radicalization.
How I Used the TRiSS Academic Fellowship
My goal was not just to recover this material but to make it accessible for systematic analysis. I digitized approximately 7,000 pages using Transkribus, an AI-powered text recognition tool widely used by historians. I trained a custom model on this material, achieving over 99% transcription accuracy, which I plan to share with the wider research community.
With fellowship support, I also brought in Matteo Pograxha, a PhD student in economics specializing in computational linguistics, to help build a Python-based data extraction pipeline over the course of 3 months. Using GPT-4-powered natural language processing, we transformed the unstructured biographical texts into a structured, searchable dataset covering 127 key variables. I combined automated extraction with expert human validation to ensure the highest possible data quality.
Following the successful digitization phase, the project is now moving into data cleaning, where I am refining and validating the dataset to ensure it is accurate, consistent, and ready for in-depth analysis.
What’s Next
With this project, I aim to:
- Create a publicly accessible digital archive on anti-Tsarist revolutionary movements.
- Produce new research on the social and demographic drivers of radicalization, especially the roles of women and ethnic minorities.
- Publish three empirical studies based on spatial and network analysis to advance our understanding of the historical roots of political violence.
By making this data openly available, I hope to open up new research opportunities in historical political economy and provide a practical model for applying AI tools to large-scale historical data analysis across the social sciences and humanities.