DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2020.2.32707

Abstract: The article studies personal history of each (any, specific) person which addresses ways to achieve person’s “historical immortality” by creating and preserving the history of one’s life. The article aims at informing the scientific community and developing the concepts, the main issues and the subject matter of personal history. The author pays special attention to the relationship of personal history with digital history, historical information science and other humanities and technical sciences. The aim of the article is attained by systematizing the interdisciplinary interaction of personal history with humanities and technical sciences. The author defines such concepts as “personal history”, “historical immortality”, poses specific problems and provides their solutions, finds the relationship of personal history with mass culture, specifies the motives, forms and ways to create person’s life history, finds the relationship of person’s “historical immortality” with information technologies and develops special software. The author concludes that person’s life history is digital history. The technical task of preserving the history of life is analyzed as well. The author shows that the philosophical foundation of personal history is the concepts of “horizon”, “life world”, and “cultural-historical horizon” and introduces such a concept as “historical death”. He demonstrates that “historical immortality» of a person is a probabilistic process which is described mathematically. The article addresses the prospects of personal history development as well. The author concludes that personal history is a system of knowledge, methods and digital technologies based on the recognition of the value of personality and aimed at achieving “historical immortality”.

DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2018.4.27814

Abstract: The article addresses five mechanisms to create past in the mass consciousness of internet users that have been singled out when analyzing the project “1917. Free history”. They are the construction of an event belt of the past through a game, the use of persons’ and institutions’ authority, the use of an authoritative format of data description, the use of special type of historical sources (personal origin sources as well as emotionally charged poems and prose) and the use of strict direction of content publication. The analysis was made in the framework of R. Barthes’ structuralist theory of myth and Yu. M. Lotman’s studies of the role of games in human life ("theater outside the theater"). The article is the first to select and analyze a myth by studying news posts by participants of a virtual historical network within 4 days in December 2017 and January 2018. The study concludes that the history of 1917 events reconstructed within a social network format is a mythology that successfully flourishes in the mass historical consciousness of Internet users since thousands of people are subscribers to the project understudy.

DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2018.4.28575

Abstract: The article discusses reflections of history students history related to digital media resources of public history. It is mainly about the project “1917. Free history” which published various materials about personal 1917 daily events and moods. The student read the media resource and its critical analysis publications and wrote their essay reviews estimating them. The article is in line with modern current debates of historiography on the problem of “history consumption”, development of principles and criteria for professional assessment of digital historical media resources. The estimates of digital media resources in total are of interest from two points of view. Firstly, this is the young audience who are accustomed to digital information. It is “their environment”. Secondly, these are opinions of future professional historians. As can be seen from the presented materials, the majority of students agree with the critical estimation of the media projects of public history reviewed.

DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2017.3.24195

Abstract: This article describes and reviews the main opportunities of the Family Archive software package created by the author to collect, systematize, study and store materials from personal archives (documents, manuscripts, books, periodicals, memories, media content and collections). The package enables to accumulate electronic copies of materials as well as original documents created and existing in an electronic form irrespective of their type or format, within one application. It also allows you to find and display the connections between data and sort them by various criteria thus contributing to identification and elimination of personal, family and ancestral history gaps. The Family Archive software package was developed within the FileMaker Pro 15 Advanced that is an application of FileMaker Inc. to create relational databases. The package does not have any total analogs and can be employed by various users to address issues when working with personal archives. The growing data volume as well as the need for data systematization account for the topicality and importance of the package functionality.

DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2020.1.32009

Abstract: The article summarizes preliminary results related to the development and operation of historical thematic website “Simeiz. Guide to Old Dachas”. The website was created by the author and his colleagues in 2019 as a part of a workshop at the Department of Source Studies of the Lomonosov Moscow State University History Faculty. The workshop aimed at studying the history of the southern coast of Crimea in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The stages and preliminary results of this work are considered in the context of current discussions about the “digital turn” in history. The author analyses the reasons for creating the historical website, its structure, development stages, specific features of its content, database creation and crowdsourcing.  It is stated that the website development was the first important step of the whole research project, its “driver”. Moreover, besides a new form of historical knowledge dissemination, the work on the site provided for setting new source and analytical tasks that is to increase the information impact of sources and get new opportunities for processing the electronic database. These results may be of interest to historians who run similar historical projects.

DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2019.1.29047

Abstract: The article addresses new possibilities to study historical sources provided both by professional historians and amateurs posting their publications in thematic historically oriented groups on online social networks. An example taken is the “Old New Simeiz” group on the social network Facebook which brings together users interested in the history of the establishment and the development of a seaside resort in the village of Simeiz on the southern coast of Crimea over the past two centuries – a topic that has not yet been fully disclosed in historical literature. Data on a number of publications, the degree of audience’s interest to historical information of various types, dating and origin have been statistically processed. The author concludes the usefulness of this historically oriented group’s publications on social networks for the dissemination of historical knowledge. These posts bear retrospective information (publication, attribution, interpretation of unknown and little-known various historical sources) and current social information (social network users’ interests).