Abstract: The interdisciplinary field of virtual 3D-reconstruction of lost cultural heritage sites is relatively young, but actively developing both in Russia and abroad. Nevertheless, the degree of elaboration of the problems of 3D-reconstruction of various types of lost interiors of cultural heritage objects against the background of an impressive number of high-quality scientifically based reconstructions of the exteriors of monastic and manor complexes, temple structures, urban development is small. Historical interiors, as one of the main forms of spatial organization of life, are unique historical monuments that contain a symbiosis of social and individual, embodied in the culture of everyday life. Stylistically and compositionally original interiors of various buildings take a special place in historical research, increasingly attracting the attention of researchers of history and culture. Rapidly developing computer technologies create more and more unique opportunities for virtual 3D-reconstruction of historical interiors and their further preservation. The article outlines the origins and main stages of the development of the problems of interior virtual reconstruction in historical research. As a result of the research, the author summarized for the first time the history of the development of research on virtual 3D interior reconstruction, traced the evolution of the main trends and research approaches to working with the source base and problems of visualizing the results of reconstructions, highlighted the current directions for solving the problem of interior 3D-reconstruction in literature and scientific projects. The developments of the author of this article create the necessary conditions for the search and adaptation of methods of working with historical sources, visualization of the results of reconstruction and its interpretation in the context of the author's work on the creation of virtual 3D-reconstructions of historical manor interiors.

Keywords: interior visualization, CAD, historiographic review, digitization of cultural heritage, three-dimensional modeling, cultural heritage, virtual reconstruction, historical interiors, methods, technologies

Abstract: The article is a review of data on the social structure of the post-war students of the historical and literary faculties of the Pskov State Pedagogical Institute (graduated in 1948–1953). The source of the data presented in the article was documents from 282 students’ personal files stored in the archives of Pskov State University. First of all, these are documents such as autobiographies, personal cards, questionnaires, characteristics and statements. Information from students' personal files was processed using the method of quantitative data analysis, produced using the Microsoft Access database management system, as well as special scientific methods of historical research. Data processing and analysis were carried out according to four categories generally accepted in Soviet period: “employees”, “peasants”, “workers”, “priests”. In addition, the article provides information about the social mobility of students’ parents, their party affiliation, the level of positions held, as well as cases of political repression. The research demonstrates the scientific perspective of university archives, their value, volume and role in the reconstruction of sociocultural transformations through which generations of students of the 20th century went. Despite the fact that the current level of development of information technology makes it possible to compile, store and analyze databases based on socio-demographic characteristics presented in student personal files, such scientific work has not become a widespread practice in Russian historiography. The article compares the results of this study with a study of the collective portrait of students at the Faculty of History of Moscow State University, based on the analysis of socio-demographic data from the personal files of students of the post-war period.

Keywords: prosopography, frequency of occurrence, database, Pskov Pedagogical Institute, post-war period, social structure, social origin, Soviet students, autobiographies, personal files

Abstract: The main stages of the development of the Internet in libraries are considered, starting from the use of e-mail in individual libraries, and ending with corporate library systems. The material covers the period from 1993 to 2003. Russian scientific libraries began to deal with the issues of using network technologies in the practice of their work in the mid-1980s. The leader in this area was the Library of Natural Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences (hereinafter referred to as LNS). In March 1984, an on-line search of information was carried out from the LNS building in Moscow in ISI databases located in ISI branches in London and Cologne. A group of specialists from ISI, who specially flew to Moscow with the necessary equipment, and technical specialists from the recently created All-Union Research Institute of Applied Automated Systems (VNIIPAS) took part in the experiment. Communication with the databases was carried out via a dial-up telephone channel. The first phase of the LIBNET network, which unites several Moscow libraries, is described. The network was created in 1994 with the financial support of the Open Society Institute. It united the State Public Scientific and Technical Library, the State Public Historical Library, the State Central Scientific Medical Library, the Natural Sciences Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Scientific Library of Moscow State University. Each library included in the project received the necessary equipment, and its connection was provided by employees of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences. At this time attempts were made to coordinate the development of network technologies for libraries, consortia were created for access to foreign electronic resources, etc.

Keywords: LibNet program, library cosortia, automation systems, historical aspect, network technologies, Internet, scientific libraries, LibWEB project, expert council, typical decisions

Abstract: The preservation of historical and cultural heritage is one of the main tasks of modern science. Historians pay special attention to solving this problem, since a large number of historical cultural objects need to be preserved or have already been lost. In this regard, it is often necessary to reconstruct their appearance based on the existing set of sources. The problem of preserving historical and cultural heritage has also affected the Moscow city estate of the Usachevs - Naydenovs, located in the center of Moscow near the Yauza River on an Earthen Rampart. The territory of the estate is notable for a number of iconic buildings. Unfortunately, some of them have been lost. One of these objects was the Tea Pavilion, a building created in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Designed by Domenico Gilardi and Afanasy Grigoriev, famous architects who worked in the Moscow Empire style. The Tea Pavilion fell into disrepair after the 1917 nationalisation and, despite the fact that the Tea Pavilion underwent a restoration in the 1950s, the building was damaged after the fire. The ruins of the Tea Pavilion were finally lost by the end of the 1980s. This article aims to recreate the history of the Usachevs' - Naydenovs' estate and its owners, as well as the formation of a source base, including descriptive sources, drawings, plans, photographs, pictorial sources – in order to further develop a virtual reconstruction of the lost Tea Pavilion, which will have the necessary degree of reliability and will represent the way the Tea Pavilion looked like in the end of the 19th century. Our next article, which will be based on the materials of this study, will aim to describe the development of 3D models of the elements of the Tea Pavilion and the creation of its virtual reconstruction.

Keywords: Grigoriev, Gilardi, source base, the Tea Pavilion, the Usachevs—Naydenovs’ city estate, Moscow, city estate, virtual reconstruction, cultural heritage, three-dimensional modeling

Abstract: This article analyzes the Russian-German trade based on the materials of the monthly "Journal of Manufactures and Trade", Russian commercial magazine, which was published in 1825-1860, and covered a wide range of economic topics. Issues of a production and commercial nature were put on the central place, as it’s supposed by the name and structure of the «Journal». The most valuable period is the first 10 years of its issue. In these articles close attention was paid to various aspects of foreign trade. The task of our research was to identify key topics, which were related to Russian-German trade relations and covered in the Journal. It was also interesting to trace the changes in the thematic content in 1825-1834, during the period of changes in customs legislation both in Russia and in German countries. To solve these tasks, the content analysis method in the computer program MAXQDA was chosen. The relevance of the work is based on the poor study of the articles’ texts of the "Journal" in the context of trade problems. The research carried out the presence of stable trends in the coverage of foreign trade issues, however, textile production issues occupied a central place, while trade was considered as a second. The main conclusion of this article was the discovery of strong links between the indicators of trade items, which were established in our previous study of the statistics of Russian-German trade, as key (wool, silk, wood), and the mention of German states in the Journal's articles. Thus, the press information confirms the statistical data in the studied period under review. The results obtained can be used for further, more in-depth research on foreign trade issues, as well, as other topics covered in the Journal.

Keywords: MAXQDA, content-analysis, trade fair, wool, silk, commercial press, The Journal of manufacture and trade, Russian-German trade, custom, foreign trade

Abstract: The policy of glasnost in the perestroika period served as an impetus for the transformation of the historical discourse adopted in the Soviet press. In addition to the revision of approaches to the country's pre-revolutionary past, the discussion centred on the so-called "white spots" in the history of the USSR. The aim of the paper is to trace the content and peculiarities of the transformation of attitudes towards Soviet history in the regional party and Komsomol press of the Kaliningrad region during the perestroika period. The study is based on the analysis of the total number of publications on historical issues in the main newspapers of the region in 1985-1991. - "Kaliningradskaya Pravda" and "Kaliningradsky Komsomolets". In the publications devoted to the history of the USSR before 1985, the main stages of Soviet history mentioned in the newspapers were identified. The list of the most significant historical figures, whose biography is reflected in the newspaper, was determined on the basis of the frequency dictionary. Special attention is paid to the issues of transformation of historical memory about the Soviet past. The newspapers were analysed using Max QDA 2020 content analysis software. Based on the frequency dictionary and expert analysis, a system of categories was developed: "stages of Soviet history", "subjects of the historical process", "political system of the USSR", "historical memory". The conclusions are drawn about the predominant preservation in the Kaliningrad press until the early 1990s of the previously accepted historical narrative with a fragmentary reference to the debatable historical topics of the glasnost era (the cult of personality, political repressions of the 1930s, the problem of reforming socialism).

Keywords: revolution, post-war reconstruction, Great Patriotic War, perestroika, practices of commemoration, historical memory, content analysis, history of the USSR, Kaliningrad Oblast, press

Abstract: Previous historical and philological commentaries on Nostradamus' "Prophecies" by Prof. Brind'Amour, R. Prevost, P. Guinard, A. Penzensky, and D. Crouzet have led to the unexpected conclusion that many quatrains are uninformative as predictions; moreover, some of them describe events preceding the moment of publication, raising questions about the predictor's motivation. Against the background of the increased interest in the development of cryptology methods in the first half of the 16th century, it is appropriate to assume the existence of a hidden message in the "Prophecies". Recent work by the author has shown that the text of the "Prophecies" contains two types of cipher. The modified algorithm "scytale" is apparently used to change the sequence of quatrains and assign them certain dates of real time. Additionally, a large graphical cipher is invisibly embedded in the text, so that specific words or letters, when mapped as stains on a plane in the coordinates "century number – quatrain number", lead to images of human faces. These images likely serve as illustrations to the prophetic text, however, their low quality and the cipher author's tendency towards surrealism make it difficult to identify the characters. The aim of this work is to propose a new method for processing the raw data to obtain higher-quality images, called the "smooth assembly" method, and to discuss Nostradamus' graphical cipher in a historical context. The results of the study suggest that Nostradamus' graphical cipher was a unique experiment in embedding images in text and had significant scientific value for the development of steganography in the 16th century. This leads to the assumption that, in addition to predictive motivation (or instead of it), the cipher author pursued a purely scientific goal – the creation of a new promising method of covert information transmission.

Keywords: reconstruction, scytale, graphic cipher, sparse images, cryptography, steganography, quatrains, prophecies, Nostradamus, camera obscura

Abstract: The article contains information about the international summer school of young scientists "Historical Informatics – 2024". The school was organized by the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Association "History and Computer". The purpose of the school is to introduce students to the latest trends in the development of the field of application of information (digital) technologies and methods of Historical Data Science in historical research, to form a modern understanding of data and methods of their processing in the field of historical science. This is the fourth Summer School in a row, which is held annually at the end of June and attracts a lot of attention from scientific youth. The school was attended by students, postgraduates and young scientists representing universities and scientific institutions from Russia and neighboring countries. The School lasts 4 working days. First, a lecture day was held, the next 2 days of classes were held in the format of master classes, during which participants had the opportunity to learn practical skills of working with methods and software. The final day included a plenary session, a conference of students and 2 round tables, then the results of the school's work were summed up. A memorable event of the school was a plenary report by a well-known expert in the field of artificial intelligence, K.V. Vorontsov, dedicated to artificial intelligence technologies in text analysis, information search and socio-humanitarian research, which caused a large number of questions and a lively discussion among the participants. Within the framework of the conference, scientific reports of students on various topics were presented, all of them made a positive impression on the audience, which included many teachers of the school. During the work of the final round table, an express survey was conducted regarding proposals on the topics of the master classes of the next school, in which the largest number of participants spoke in favor of artificial intelligence. The feedback from students received after graduation noted the relevance of the topic and the high scientific level of lectures and master classes.

Keywords: statistics, artificial intelligence, digital technologies, master class, lecture, Data Science, historical information science, summer school, historical source, method

Abstract: On July 10, 2024, Alexey Anatolyevich Frolov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, President of the Association "History and Computer", a leading researcher at the Institute of Universal History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a talented scientist and a wonderful person, passed away. His contribution to historical science, in particular in such areas as the source study of Russian history, historical geography and cartography of Russia, as well as historical computer science, is difficult to overestimate. The entire life of the graduate of the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University A.A. Frolov was associated with research work in the listed branches of historical science. After graduating from the university, his professional activity began in the Tver region, Torzhok, a significant part of his activities during these years was related to archaeological research.  Within the framework of historical informatics, A.A. Frolov was a unique specialist, combining in his work high qualifications in the field of history with a deep understanding of the essence of information and computer technologies and possession of practical skills in creating databases, Internet sites and digital maps. He raised the issues of creating a repository of historical spatial data and integrating geodata. A.A. Frolov stood at the origins of Russian historical geoinformatics, his contribution to the process of adapting geoinformation systems and technologies for the needs and purposes of historical science is invaluable – ultimately for turning historical geoinformatics into a full-fledged historical research tool. A.A. Frolov actively participated in scientific life, was a regular participant in scientific conferences in Russia and abroad, he is the author of a number of scientific papers that brought him well-deserved fame in the circles of the Russian scientific historical community. In 2022, A.A. Frolov was elected President of the Association "History and Computer", where in a relatively short time he managed to become a leader of the scientific community and earn high prestige not only as a scientist, but also as an organizer of science.

Keywords: Association, geographic information technologies, geographic information system, historical information science, historical source study, project, database, website, cadaster book, conference