Digital Innovations in Philology

Profession

The professional activity of a modern philologist is impossible without the use of digital technologies, tools and resources. To be able to create search services, carry out linguistic expertise of websites, blogs and social networks, critically research the media text, develop content for digital resources, philologists of the 21st century should be proficient in innovative technologies.
Today the digital technologies are used for interpreting texts, reconstructing, visualizing and animating processes that characterize sociocultural phenomena.
Training under the Master’s degree program “Digital Innovations in Philology” will allow graduates to acquire both complex knowledge in modern philology and the skills of using digital technologies in order to solve such problems as the development of data analysis tools and the analysis itself; linguistic expertise of IT products, management of social and cultural projects, Internet marketing and advertising.
Digital philologists will be able to analyze almost limitless text arrays using software products and special databases, solve applied problems from such an area of knowledge as Digital Humanities and create different corpora of texts and dictionaries in the information environment. They will be responsible for creating text databases, electronic libraries with access to rare or unique publications, become scientific communicators, go to work in Data Science and NLP-engineering (Natural Language Processing: a part of data analysis related to natural language processing).

Educational Process

The basis of training in the educational program “Digital Innovations in Philology” is a metasubject approach that combines universal philological competences with specific ‘digital’ competencies.
In the process of mastering the program, students acquire professional knowledge in the field of modern philology, semiotics, cognitive science, analysis of modern linguistic processes, corpus linguistics, infostylistics, literary editing of media texts, intercultural practices in the digital and traditional environment, as well as practical skills and abilities in the field of automatic text analysis, automatic natural language processing, programming, and electronic linguodidactics.
An important element of training is the effective use of data mining programs, machine learning and corpus linguistics in information processing technological processes, production of digital media content, graphic content, multimedia content, programming in high-level languages. For this purpose, the program includes the following subjects:
— text analytics;
— linguistic and sociological analysis of social networks;
— web development;
— interactive data visualization;
— semantic information processing;
— critical research of communication;
— digital technologies for comparative text research;
— digital marketing tools and services;
— pedagogical design;
— tools for project activities in the human sciences;
— legal issues in digital humanities;
— programming in the Python language;
— spreadsheet editor: advanced Excel;
— database management systems in the human sciences;
— machine learning and speech recognition tools; and
— algorithms for analyzing social networks.
Under the program “Digital Innovations in Philology”, students are supposed to learn two foreign languages.
The development and implementation of practical exercises is carried out jointly with representatives of the leaders of the domestic digital business, including the companies MTS, IBS, Yandex, and the international corporation Samsung.

Practice

The program provides for several types of practices.
Each practice is aimed at developing specific skills, allowing students to fully apply theoretical knowledge.
The program includes:
— stationary introductory practice;
— teaching practice;
— research work; and
— predegree practice.
The practice bases will be the International Center for Digitalization of Pre-University Training of the Russian Language Institute of the RUDN University, the Center for the Development of Digital Technologies in Educational Processes of the RUDN University, the RUDN University Distance Learning Laboratory, Russian and foreign partner universities (Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Tyumen State University, Don State Technical University, University of Victoria (Canada), University of Applied Technical and Economic Sciences (Germany), etc.).
Research work and predegree practice are carried out based on the organizations of the real sector of economy, including the: MTS and IBS companies as well as the Russia Today media group.

Career

The practical orientation and meta-subject essence of the program “Digital Innovations in Philology” will allow graduates to work in any area of the real sector of economy as well as find themselves in those professions that are now included in the catalog of ‘professions of the future’, such as:
— Infostylist;
— Virtual world designer (a specialist in the creation of fictional realities and metauniverses);
— Augmented and virtual reality engineer;
— Media police officer is a law enforcement officer in the Web, who fights against illegal content, cybercriminals, including those who commit crimes against individuals (cyberbullying, stalking, Internet fraud);
— Media program developer;
— Cross-cultural communication manager (who helps multinational corporations work with foreign partners, taking into account all kinds of cultural characteristics of this market);
— Educational trajectory developer;
— Author of educational AI-based courses;
— Mind-fitness trainer;
— Data journalist (who analyzes and collects big data in order to prepare articles, notes and other formats of journalistic materials, including interactive ones, on their basis);
— Digital transformation instructor;
— Data architect;
— Digital linguist;
— IT-/AI-ethics specialist.
Graduates will also be able to continue their studies under the postgraduate training program.