Our article focuses on a corpus of crime television series reflecting upon differences between western and eastern Europe – a phenomenon that we will address as the ‘West–East slope’. The series figure as instances of the struggle for recognition at the level of the social imaginary, between western and eastern Europe. Addressing the double logic of the western narrative on eastern Europe and the eastern narrative of western Europe, one of our main findings is that the recognition aesthetics of eastern Europe produced a multi-layered representation of the West varying from country to country. On the other hand in western productions, there is still a bias towards a more politically correct image of easternness, a state of affairs that is questioned by eastern European attempts to produce their original contents.

According to the recommendation of the United Nations, national censuses should be taken at least every 10 years, and countries across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe are usually fairly disciplined in following this instruction. True, some European countries, including Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands or Iceland have in the last 30 years replaced traditional census enumerations with maintaining precise administrative registers, Ukraine however, is not one of these countries. With its last census carried out in 2001, the largest entirely European country is similar in this regard to countries such as Uzbekistan, Iraq or Sri Lanka. Because there is no reliable source of population data in Ukraine, estimations from different organizations and individuals vary considerably. In 2019 the UN estimates Ukraine’s population to be 43.8 M (the 2001 census result was 48.7 M), while according to the State Statistics Service of Ukraine (Grosstat), the number is 42.1 M (1.7 Million difference). The picture gets more complicated when we look at non-official estimates by politicians, non-governmental organizations, foreign press and further, otherwise serious sources: calculations that consider the proto-states of the Donbass region and Crimea to be part of Ukraine get results of 30-35 M people, while without these regions, Ukraine’s population is calculated to be somewhere between 20-26 million. Looking at these numbers the only apparent conclusion one can arrive at is the incredible degree of uncertainty. In a country where most families are in one way or another affected by permanent emigration, forced migration due to the war, seasonal work migration and the emigration of military-age men to avoid getting drafted, the population changes quickly. In my poster presentation I aim to showcase a number of different “creative” methods that official institutions in Ukraine use to get a picture of the actual population of the country and its regions, focusing mainly in Transcarpathia. These resourceful but often highly unreliable calculations include measuring bread consumption regionally and keeping count of the active mobile service users.

Google Trends is a publicly available free tool that provides minute-by-minute, regional statistics on the popularity of keywords users type in the search engine. Although this massive and exponentially growing data set has its limitations, it provides a unique look into the minds of Internet users. As opposed to direct questionnaires, people using Google have no incentives to lie or to hide their true interests, yet they are motivated to be as honest and precise about their questions as they possibly can. This source of information, when combined with official data provided by government institutions can help researchers understand behavioural patterns and overtime can assist in predicting epidemics or anticipating cultural trends. This presentation will focus on a research aiming to use Hungarian administrative health data concerning the influenza epidemics from 2004 to 2018 to see how frequent certain flu-related searches were in the periods preceding the cold and flu season, and during the period itself. After determining which Google keywords work best as indicators of a flu outbreak, we tested Google Trends solely to measure the accuracy with which we could have predicted a forthcoming flu epidemic in the past few years. The goal of our research was to experiment with ways in which researchers studying local phenomena could take advantage of the massive amounts of free, public data from digital footprints of the local population. During our research we have experimented with using Google Trends to mirror and possibly predict consumer behaviour and as an alternative to conducting social surveys.

HBO Hungary’s original series, Aranyélet, proves to be an interesting case study in terms of location strategies in Eastern European TV shows. It is refreshing in the sense that – contrary to other TV programmes attempting to showcase life in Budapest – it does not feel the need to represent locality by swamping the viewer with iconic tourist destinations of the capital. Instead, the characteristic “Hungarianness” of the show appears through displaying personal living spaces of people from a wide range of socio-cultural backgrounds, all of which represent the typical Hungarian strata.In our paper, we have used a simplified categorization of social classes apparent in Hungarian society and connected these groups with characters of Aranyélet. Then, we have scrutinized the living spaces of these characters as represented in the show, paying special attention to their likely location, furnishing, building materials, and general condition. By this analysis, we aim to prove that the show tries to create an alternative mental map of Budapest and its population, covering all strata of society with painting a picture of their lifestyle and living conditions.Our paper draws on the work of Kim Toft Hansen and Anne Marit Waade, who, in their volume Locating Nordic Noir – From Beck to The Bridge, place a large emphasis on aspects of location studies in contemporary Scandinavian crime.

Traditionally, literary studies have not focused on the production of literature. Similarly, editorial work or marketing practices are often not taken into account. The study of "serious" literary works, which has normally followed the practice of close reading, has always put the emphasis on the subject's intrinsically literary character: "the work produced according to the logic of a strongly autonomous field calls for a differential, distinctive perception, attentive to deviations from other works, contemporary or past" (Bourdieu, 1994: 77, our translation). Only literary works belonging to the 'subfield of large-scale production' (Bourdieu, 1995: 121), produced according to an explicitly economic logic, that has especially drawn the attention of literary scholars to the mechanisms of the literary market. However, in the last two decades, there has been an increasing number of analyses focusing on this part of the literary system, namely the book market.