DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2021.1.35282

Abstract: The article is a review of the book “What is Digital History?” by Salmi H. which discusses digital history, a new field in history, and defines its framework. The review considers a range of issues related to digital sources, their typology, approaches to the formation of the source base and their criticism. The article analyzes the author’s attitude to digitized historical sources based on original analogous sources and born-digital ones as well as methods of their processing used by contemporary historians. These aspects have a direct impact on present day historical research and must be taken into account by historians. The review also addresses the author's views on epistemology and hermeneutics which are increasingly important in the digital age.  The topics named are unevenly distributed in the book. Sources of a new type are considered in detail in the chapter “The Digital Past: Sources and Problems”. Other issues are studied in the rest of chapters and in less detail. The review is complemented with examples of other projects and modern publications that were not included in the text of the reviewed book, but are essential for the topic as a whole.

DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2018.4.28053

Abstract: The article studies personal alphabetic indexes to transcripts of State Duma meetings in the early 20th century. Alphabetic transcripts indexes are important as they structurally demonstrate activity of each Duma member thus allowing one to qualitatively and quantitatively estimate deputies’ work. The article traces changing approaches to publish information about personal characteristics and parliamentarians’ activity and studies the source structure and content dynamics. The research methodology is based on the analysis of historical XML markup texts. To solve the research problems the author has developed a scheme of XML markup of indexes texts. Their structure included tags to describe the main source parameters such as source metadata, deputies’ personal characteristics and activities during sessions of the first through the fourth convocations of the Russian parliament. Tag analysis provided for estimating the degree of precision deputies’ activity was described as well as changing structure of data presentation and find permanent information about deputies and variable data in different session indexes. The results of this study allow one to estimate the information potential of the source in its dynamics, make up for incompleteness of data with information from transcripts and analyze the nesting of tags to classify deputies according to activity characteristics.