Digital Methodologies for the Historiography of the History of Europe

2022 ◽  
pp. 746-763
Author(s):  
Alessandro Laruffa

Within the historiography of history of Europe in the 20th century, it can be observed that the methodologies are mostly structured on archival research and comparative methods. Currently, the digital revolution has enabled the management of large amounts of data, information, and statistics. The history of historiography could consider the innovative methodologies for historical research like the digital humanities. This chapter reports the test of Omeka-S, an open-source content management system (CMS) specifically designed for humanities studies, on the history of European historiography. Omeka has been applied for the functions of digitisation, metadatation, and geolocation in accordance with international standards. The case study is the Association of European Historians (AsE), a network of historians from several European and non-European countries founded in 1983. The use of Omeka-S, in combination with traditional methodologies and network analysis, allows a more in-depth examination of the AsE's network and its historiographical paradigm.

Author(s):  
Vera V. Serdechnaia ◽  

The article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of literary romanticism. The research aims at a refinement of the “romanticism” concept in relation to the history of the literary process. The main research methods include conceptual analysis, textual analysis, comparative historical research. The author analyzes the semantic genesis of the term “romanticism”, various interpretations of the concept, compares the definitions of different periods and cultures. The main results of the study are as follows. The history of the term “romanticism” shows a change in a number of definitions for the same concept in relation to the same literary phenomena. By the end of the 20th century, realizing the existence of significant contradictions in the content of the term “romanticism”, researchers often come to abandon it. At the same time, the steady use of the term “romanticism” testifies to the subject-conceptual component that exists in it, which does not lose its relevance, but just needs a theoretical refinement. Conclusion: one have to revise an approach to romanticism as a theoretical concept, based on the change in the concept of an individual in Europe at the end of the 18th century. It is the newly discovered freedom of an individual predetermines the rethinking for the image of the author as a creator and determines the artistic features of literary romanticism.


Author(s):  
Elena V. Gordienko ◽  

This article analyzes the Story of a fisherman Yết Kiêu (歇驕) who is worshiped as a tutelary spirit in villages of Northern Vietnam. Yết Kiêu is a semi-mythical character and he is widely credited with supernatural abilities and merits in war against the Mongols (1288). I investigate the text that belongs to thần tích genre (神). It is a manuscript written in Vietnamese at Yết Kiêu’s birthplace, which is the central place of his worship (on the basis of previous texts of the 16th–19th centuries). The Story of Yết Kiêu has a complex structure reflecting the history of the development of this particular text and the whole genre as well. The story can be divided in four parts differing in form and content: the folk layer (the oldest part), the historical narrative (likely compiled by court historiographers in the 15th–17th centuries), the legend of Yết Kiêu’s Mongolian bride (emerged evidently in a temple community during later centuries) and the description of Yết Kiêu’s cult (which appeared under the influence of the European research methods in the early 20th century). The article contains a fragment of the story translated into Russian.


2020 ◽  
pp. 277-292
Author(s):  
Ekaterina I. Nosova ◽  

Interest in the history of book collections is not a recent phenomenon. However, rapid development of computers and the Internet over the past twenty years has provided researchers with new tools for network analysis, such as UCI6 и NetDraw 2.160. Continuing to identify the provenance of the documents kept in the Western European Section of the Scientific Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author had to face the fact that abundance of information and complexity of the links between various sources make it difficult to make out the complete picture. The Western European section of the Scientific Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences is mostly based on the collection of the academician N P. Likhachev (1862—1936). N.P. Likhachev contacted hundreds of antiquarian firms around the world, and thus his collection fits into the complex and interwoven system of the European antiquarian market of the late 19th–early 20th century. To overcome the problem of branching data, the author decided to call on the experience of sociologists and to use computer programs for network analysis that enable to reflect and comprehend the links between objects. The article is to present the process and results of this work, as well as to underscore problems and specificity of the programs in relation to the archival material. The main source is data from the personal provenance archive of the academician N. P. Likhachev, collection of documents on the history of the Western European Section, and artifacts from the Likhachev collection. The second layer of sources is antiquarian catalogs. The program can visualize these two layers of information in different ways by using different colors and lines. Overlaying of the schemes allows completing of missing elements in the chain of provenance. It should be noted that due to the richness of the sources, the network, originally compiled for the collection of N.P. Likhachev, grows into a pan-European system of “collector-antiquarian” relationships. It opens wide perspectives for research.


Author(s):  
C. Stanga ◽  
C. Spinelli ◽  
R. Brumana ◽  
D. Oreni ◽  
R. Valente ◽  
...  

This essay describes the combination of 3D solutions and software techniques with traditional studies and researches in order to achieve an integrated digital documentation between performed surveys, collected data, and historical research. The approach of this study is based on the comparison of survey data with historical research, and interpretations deduced from a data cross-check between the two mentioned sources. The case study is the Basilica of S. Ambrogio in Milan, one of the greatest monuments in the city, a pillar of the Christianity and of the History of Architecture. It is characterized by a complex stratification of phases of restoration and transformation. Rediscovering the great richness of the traditional architectural notebook, which collected surveys and data, this research aims to realize a virtual notebook, based on a 3D model that supports the dissemination of the collected information. It can potentially be understandable and accessible by anyone through the development of a mobile app. The 3D model was used to explore the different historical phases, starting from the recent layers to the oldest ones, through a virtual subtraction process, following the methods of Archaeology of Architecture. Its components can be imported into parametric software and recognized both in their morphological and typological aspects. It is based on the concept of LoD and ReverseLoD in order to fit the accuracy required by each step of the research.


Author(s):  
Utash B. Ochirov ◽  

Introduction. The article analyzes historiography and history of the 110th Kalmyk Cavalry Division, the only ethnic Kalmyk (largely) military unit that was engaged in active combat operations during the Great Patriotic War. However, despite its huge contribution to the heroic struggle against invading troops the unit — worthy of decent memory and respect — got surrounded with defamatory myths that bear no relation to actual events. Since most of the Division’s documents submitted to archives had disappeared, it took several decades to objectively examine its history. Materials and methods. The historical genetic method being a principal one for the present research, the latter also employs historical systemic and comparative methods. The sources analyzed are books and articles, official documents and correspondence from various archival repositories, personal messages and memoirs by veterans of the 110th Kalmyk Cavalry Division and researchers of its history. Results. The article is a consistent review of the unit’s historiography that may be divided into five stages to be designated as follows: 1) period of silence and lies (1943–1957), 2) period of ‘sporadic’ studies (1957–1967), 3) period of active scientific work (1967–1977), 4) period of indifference (1977–2011), and 5) period of new scholarly interest (2011 to the present). The Kalmyk Cavalry Division has long been an object of defamatory insinuations and calumny when it was accused of ‘unreliability’, denounced as a ‘gang’ or even as German collaborators — these had clearly political implications. Meanwhile, the historical research was seriously complicated by the loss of most of its documents although after the disbandment those were duly handed over according to inventory lists along with the banners. This severely obstructed the process of preserving historical memory of the only ethnic Kalmyk unit that fought against the enemy during the Great Patriotic War. Hence, the difficulties that scholars in the field have had to overcome were immense. Part One of the article covers stages one to three. Conclusions. Historiography of the 110th Kalmyk Cavalry Division may be described as a difficult and winding path, with periods of both oblivion and activation experienced.


2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penelope Francks

The growth of consumption and the emergence of the consumer have become major fields of study in the history of Europe and North America but have been largely neglected by historians of Japan, especially economic ones. This paper argues that, in Japan as elsewhere, the “birth of the consumer” predated the onset of industrialization—hence was not simply a function of the opening of the country to Western modernity—and that the growth of consumption, of “indigenous” as well as “foreign” goods, went on to represent an integral part of the process of economic development. This argument is illustrated by a case study of growth and change in the “ordinary consumption” of food and drink, and in particular of sake, a “traditional” product that emerged as a major consumer good, and of beer, the “foreign” product that was to become, alongside sake, one of the necessities of modern Japanese life.


Author(s):  
Turner S

The roads to becoming a palaeontologist or contributing to the discipline are many and varied and for women, often tortuous. Concentrating on early to mid 20th century women in Europe brings to light some of the ways in which women survived in the field of vertebrate palaeontology (VP) studying from the earliest fish to our own human relatives. Only are few are known: e.g., in Britain (Pearson, Steen, Rayner), France (Friant, Dechaseaux), Germany (Edinger, von Huene), Hungary (Mottl), The Netherlands (Schreuder, Sanders,), Romania (von Nopsca), and Sweden (Carlsson, Christie-Lind). It is not always easy to unravel the whys and hows of their scientific contributions or even the basic details of their lives but new historical research has brought to light over 1200 women in VP. Their paths to contributing to VP and the difficulties overcome add to the history of women in science and may inspire others to choose a life in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).


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