Masha Meleshko-Sudina
Doctoral researcher at the C²DH
Masha works on the project ‘THE KYIV METROPOLITAN – SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM AND A SYMBOL. A BIOGRAPHY OF INFRASTRUCTURE BY MEANS OF DEEP VISUALISATION‘ under the supervision of Andreas Fickers
My PhD research focuses on the Kyiv Metro system from the beginning of its construction in 1944 to the present. It is a case study on the city of Kyiv, investigating at the state level how changes in construction, development technologies, and operational rationale correlate with the social and political processes in place in Ukrainian SSR and independent Ukraine consequently.
My project is situated between the history of technology, Ukrainian urban history and digital humanities. My multi-layered interdisciplinary approach combines deep mapping for specialisation and visualisation, discourse analysis for text mining, as well as a network analysis to establish connections between the metro and other urban Large Technical Systems (LTS). I study heterogeneous data sets from archival material and newspaper articles to maps and images.
The novelty of the project lies in my two-fold approach of compiling a biography of infrastructure and creating deep visualisations. Within a frame of the DTU D4H, my project is located at the crossroads of historical and data sciences, applying computational methods as well as data visualisation.