Saving Ivanovo Folklore With AI: How Russian Researchers Are Digitizing Cultural Memory

When Artificial Intelligence Meets Folk Culture

Faculty members and students at Ivanovo State University (ISU) have launched a project to organize and digitize the region’s folklore archive, which contains materials collected between 1974 and 1990. Using artificial intelligence, the team is converting a largely analog collection of cultural records into a structured digital database that will be available to researchers across Russia.

The project emerged from the team’s participation in the All-Russian School of Applied Data Analysis, where students learned how to apply AI tools to real scientific and practical problems. Those skills are now being put to work in an unexpected domain: preserving local cultural heritage.

According to the University Consortium of Big Data Researchers, the initiative will make it possible to compare Ivanovo folklore with folk traditions from across the country, while opening access to rare recordings for a broad research community. What was once locked in archives is becoming searchable, comparable, and reusable.

From Manual Archiving to Meaningful Insight

Ivanovo folklore includes fairy tales, songs, folk rhymes, and traditional beliefs—forms of expression that reveal how people lived and understood the world in previous decades. Until recently, studying such materials required painstaking manual searches and individual analysis of physical records.

By creating a structured database hosted on the university library’s website, the ISU team is dramatically changing that workflow. Researchers will spend less time locating artifacts and more time analyzing content, identifying recurring themes, and drawing connections across regions and time periods.

This shift reflects a broader trend: as AI moves into the humanities, it transforms not just access to information, but the questions scholars can ask. Regional cultural heritage, once difficult to explore at scale, becomes visible and accessible to both academics and the public.

AI trained on national content can become a powerful tool for developing creative industries, preserving cultural heritage, and building a strong national identity in the digital era. It opens opportunities to create unique products and services that reflect cultural authenticity. At the same time, it’s essential to remain open. Understanding global technology trends and actively engaging with the international community is key to long-term development.

Valentina Shumilova

Founder and CEO of Rupolis Group, as well as a cultural philanthropist

Why Cultural AI Matters Now

The use of AI for cultural preservation is accelerating in Russia, particularly in regional projects. These initiatives increasingly sit at the intersection of education, technology, and national cultural policy. Advocates argue that developing domestic AI solutions is critical for preserving cultural identity.

AI systems trained on foreign datasets may unintentionally reproduce external cultural norms and values. By contrast, AI trained on local content helps safeguard cultural specificity while also stimulating demand for Russian IT solutions. That demand, in turn, creates opportunities for small regional teams to develop expertise and scale their work.

The ISU project is already being viewed as a successful example of applied AI in a field that traditionally relied on analog methods. In the future, similar methodologies and tools could be adapted and exported to help digitize folklore archives in other countries, turning local cultural preservation into a globally relevant technological practice.