This short paper proposes a compact workflow for structuring and inspecting a historically situated micro-corpus and demonstrates it on ten dated poems by Arseny Nesmelov published in 1940 in Harbin (day/month/year and page metadata). The aim is exploratory and method-oriented: rather than claiming a finalized interpretation, we show how transparent preprocessing and inspectable outputs support data-grounded inquiry into émigré poetry and its social imaginaries (Hinrichs 1987).

Each poem is encoded with a lightweight schema (ISO date, page, title) and maintained in two text layers to preserve philological traceability while enabling reproducible processing. We extract interpretable features suited to small-scale data, focusing on (i) community indexing via first-person singular/plural forms (“I/We” and related collectives) and (ii) coercion-related imagery and vocabulary (judgement/violence lexica). Frequency profiles, collocation, and KWIC tables provide preliminary, inspectable results. Building on the idea that distributional evidence can complement close reading (Jockers 2013), we report initial findings from these outputs and outline how they will be refined before the conference.

Even at micro-corpus scale, the dated sequence enables cautious comparison across the 1940 timeline and helps identify where collective positioning and coercion imagery are foregrounded. For interpretive accountability, a subset is manually checked for preprocessing errors and false positives/negatives in seed lists, summarized via a brief error typology (polysemy, negation/irony, metaphorically marked lexemes). The contribution is a portable approach for turning émigré poetic materials into reusable data and tracing “I/We” community formation alongside coercion imagery across a dated sequence.