Literary journals, understood as professional media of material and symbolic literary production in general (cf. Dorleijn/van Rees 2001) and as media in which and through which competing groups fight for supremacy in the literary field in particular, represent the form of positioning par excellence for authors in Belarus in the 1920s (cf. Kohler 2016) and to a certain extent structure the field (Navumenka 2012). In the specific constellation of the 1920s, they are also the place where individual strategies and institutional action come together in a special way.

It is therefore all the more astonishing that the Belarusian literary journals of the 1920-30s have not yet been systematically indexed or digitised. The project "Database of Belarusian Literary Journals of the 1920s and 1930s" addresses this research desideratum by digitising and processing the tables of contents of the four most important literary journals of the 1920s and 1930s, Polymja (1922 to the present), Maladnjak (1923-1932), Uzvyšša (1927-1931) and Kalos'se (1934-1939). The restriction to the tables of contents of these literary journals, which was initially due to necessity (text recognition-based coding has not yet been feasible due to the print quality of the journals and the inconsistent orthography, i.e. the digital copies have to be transcribed by hand in order to be able to code them), proves to be productive because it draws attention to the table of contents as a 'paratext' of the literary periodical and to its high informative value with regard to institutional, conceptual, poetological and quantitative aspects.

The prototype of the database, which is currently being trialled, comprises a total of 201 tables of contents (1922-1939) with a total of 3616 items. For the time being, the research interest guiding the coding is to obtain information

• on the reciprocal mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion between the journals as well as on author movements and hierarchisations;

• the development and differentiation of literary criticism and the literary genre system;

• on the formal and conceptual professionalisation of the literary journal as a text type

A project proposal is currently being prepared to raise funds for the enrichment and further development of the database. It is planned to add further smaller literary journals to the corpus, the literary newspaper supplement Čyrvony sejbit and, if possible, the literary journals of the national minorities, Jungėr Arbejter and Štėrn (Yidd.) and Orka (Polish). The feasibility of including the literary section of the newspaper Zvjazda (Forum for Russian-language publications) is being examined. The gradual integration of Ukrainian literary journals, which represent a central point of reference for the Belarusian literary system, is also envisaged.

Further information on the "Database of Belarusian Literary Journals" can be found on the posters for the Digital Humanities 2017, Montréal - please click here and the TEI Conference 2016, Vienna - please click here.

A presentation of the database and first approaches to analysis in Belarusian language can be found here (lecture Minsk 2017).

Project leader: Gun-Britt Kohler in scientific cooperation with: Ingo Börner (University of Vienna); student assistant: Samra Dzikezi