Carrie Pirmann, Social Sciences Librarian at Bucknell University, has a tangential connection to Ukraine - her hometown of Boyertown, Pennsylvania established a sister-city relationship with Bohodukhiv, Ukraine, when Pirmann was in high school. Although a few teachers from the city visited her high school, and her best friend participated in an exchange program to Bohodukhiv, it has been Pirmann’s involvement with SUCHO that has best acquainted her with Ukrainian culture - she’s even begun to recognize a few words in Cyrillic.
Kim Martin, Assistant Professor of History and Culture and Technology Studies at the University of Guelph, came to SUCHO through Twitter – “like all good things in the digital humanities,” she laughs. “I saw what they were doing in the first week of the project and got involved just by jumping on the Slack channel. I started by just finding links for different places, different websites. I have an interest in oral history, so I was looking for oral histories from different towns and cities. I knew very little about Ukraine when I dove into the project, so it’s very exciting to learn more about the country – although obviously not under the greatest of circumstances.”
It seems quite fortuitous that, after a social media hiatus, Erica Peaslee wound up back on Twitter in February of this year. After a few weeks of engagement, the algorithm led Peaslee to a thread between coordinators Quinn Dombrowski, Anna Kijas, and Sebastian Majstorovic discussing their work with SUCHO.
“If you asked me three weeks ago if I could have done the stuff I’ve been doing these past few weeks, I would’ve laughed and said, ‘oh heck no, give me like three years for that’ – and we did it in a month. It’s been amazing, really inspiring so far.”