This project grew out of my digitization work at the Wende Museum and expanded into a Digital Humanities capstone focused on metadata design and network analysis. Working with English-language copies of USSR in Construction (1930–1935), one of the Soviet Union’s most ambitious propaganda magazines and alongside a classmate, we built a comprehensive metadata framework tailored to the collection’s historical and cultural context. This involved cataloging contributors, themes, and geographic references, combining Library of Congress Subject Headings with locally developed vocabularies to account for Soviet-specific terminology, transliteration challenges, and changed country names.

Once the metadata was established, I created an interactive network visualization that reveals connections between themes, geographic locations, and cultural figures across the magazine’s first five years. This allowed users to explore questions that traditional cataloging systems often obscure, such as: how Soviet industrial projects were staged regionally, which photographers and designers collaborated across issues, and how narratives about modernization shifted between the First and Second Five-Year Plans. I also incorporated geographic and thematic visualizations to highlight patterns of representation and the ideological strategies embedded in the magazine’s design.

For me, this project underscored how metadata is not just descriptive, but interpretive. The way we structure information, whether through vocabularies, frameworks, or visualization choices, directly shapes what becomes visible in a collection. By pairing collections work with computational methods, this project aimed to expand how researchers, educators, and students can access these rare materials while also demonstrating how digital tools can expose new insights.