Databases of visual sources in the Internet: problems of heuristics (based on the example of studying the history of the Southern coast of Crimea in the early XX century)

Karagodin Andrey Vasil'evich PhD in History Senior Lecturer, the Department of Source Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University 119992, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Lomonosovskii Prospekt, 27 k.4, aud. E445 avkaragodin@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction: Digital turn and humanitarian knowledge

In recent years, a discussion has been unfolding in society about the consequences of the "digital turn" for humanitarian knowledge. An article by S. Magsudi, E. Lan, Jie Xu and M. van der Shaar, published in 2021 in the authoritative IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, is noteworthy and is devoted to the impact of the "digital transition" on science and education in the era of the "post-pandemic" ^[40]. The authors postulate the urgent need to "carefully study the revolutionary push that has taken place in the field of knowledge production" and assume that the future of knowledge will depend primarily on the quality of the content offered, which, in all likelihood, will increasingly be created through digital technologies: "online platforms can offer more, especially for creating knowledge networks which facilitate the assimilation of information, as well as ensure close interaction of researchers" ^[40]. The content, according to the authors, will definitely become multimodal: other ways of fixing and distributing it will be added to text media - photos, audio, video, and so on.

For representatives of the professional historical community, the rapid pace of development of the information society is also undoubtedly a challenge. The historian can no longer imagine his life without the use of global information networks and databases that provide effective information interaction, access to world knowledge resources, electronic libraries, catalogs of archival and museum collections ^[38]. Network teams of researchers working on academic projects are being formed, being thousands of kilometers away from each other. The exchange of research materials is steadily expanding, carried out through the communities of enthusiasts-distributors of knowledge (Academia, Dazator, PeerJ, Authorea, and in Russia - Cyberleninka, "Savings Education"). Network communities of lay historians are beginning to play an important role in historiography ^[3]. All this forces representatives of historical science to reflect intensely on the changing identity of their profession. This story was at the center of discussions at the XXII International Congress of Historical Sciences in China in 2015, entirely devoted to the problems of the "Digital Turn" ^[4]. In 2021, a discussion club on the issues of "digital history", "digital humanities" and digitalization of historical science was created in the editorial office of the journal "Historical Informatics" ^[5].

L.I.Borodkin, introducing the reader into the context of modern discussions about the "digital future" of historical science, cites one of the points of view according to which new technological possibilities of working with information form a "new form of historical knowledge", which is defined as "not a linear narrative, but a website, map or database that allows not not only to present historical sources as fully and reliably as possible, but also to find a non-hierarchical visual form of representation of different points of view, private and public, documents and memories" ^[2]. Such resources can be thought of as a kind of "secondary", or meta-sources, simultaneously aggregating historical information of different types and species and facilitating information search. Also noteworthy, from the point of view of L.I. Borodkin, is the opinion of the American researcher S. Robertson (Univ. Mason, USA), who considers the creation of collections of digitized data, their presentation and dissemination on the web to be central to the developing "digital history" ^[2].

Databases and data banks: development traditions in Russian historiography

In Russian historiography, the development of quantitative methods for processing historical information, digital algorithms for information retrieval and the creation of computer databases has a long tradition associated primarily with the works of the Departments of Source Studies and Historical Informatics of the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University ^[8]. At a new stage, the achievements of the school of academician I.D. Kovalchenko are being updated, who warned in 1987 in the monograph "Methods of Historical Research": "now there are no such fields of science that mathematical methods and computers would not invade. The subsequent progress of historical science will simply be impossible without quantitative methods and computers" ^{[20, p.310]}. Already in the 1980s and 1990s, the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University successfully solved the problems of developing concrete historical issues based on mass historical data, forming a source base characterized by a complex nature, including through the use of different types of materials, which required solving the source problems of data comparison, combining them and creation of databases with their subsequent mathematical and statistical processing. This significantly expanded the informative possibilities of the empirical basis of concrete historical research ^{[11, pp.238-239]}.

In the literature, a division has been established into "source-oriented" and "problem-oriented" databases (otherwise called "from source" and "from model" databases) ^{[6; 7]}. The creation of a database focused on sources allows you to fully reflect their content in electronic form, as well as to compare information from various sources, to find discrepancies in them. In turn, a "problem-oriented database" is a type of databases, in the formation of which the basis of the ideology of extracting and selecting information, its formalization, aggregation (categorization) and input into information fields is the posed research problem, through the prism of which the database is formed. As pointed out by I.M.Garskova, the "model" approach helps to more clearly set the research task and formulate data requirements, increases the level of source analysis of sources, because it assumes a more rigorous assessment of their information potential ^{[6, p.89]}.

Turning to visual sources is an actual trend of historical science

At the same time, if until recently it was mainly about databases based on written sources (bibliographic, library, archival, factual, statistical, etc.), today the emphasis in historiography is shifting to databases that primarily involve the information potential of visual sources.

This shift is caused by a number of paradigmatic changes in world historical science. The socio-cultural, historical and anthropological approach coming to the fore in modern historiography, the "memorial" and "spatial" turns force historians to attract new sources that were outside the range of interests earlier ^{[29; 30]}. The study of "historical memory" is based, of course, primarily on narrative sources: the memories of participants and witnesses of events. However, the range of sources for the study of memory is far from being exhausted by them: we are talking about going beyond the written source, the appearance of such forms of "representation of the past" as visual and monumental in the structure of the source base for the study of historical memory ^[32]. Due to the increased technical armament of the historian, the constant digitization of archives and museum funds, the availability of banks of digitized images, it is visual sources – photo, film, video documents - that come to the fore: it becomes quite clear why many historiographers today are talking about a "visual turn" in historical research ^{[1; 22; 30]}.

Photographs and postcards are the most important source of historical information. It is considered that the "postcard age" began at the end of the XIX century and lasted at least until the middle of the second half of the 1960s of the XX century ^{[22; 34; 35]}. The postcard, or "postcard for open messages" came into use in the XIX century. France and Germany are contesting the primacy in the publication of an illustrated postcard. In 1874, the newly created Universal Postal Union, having approved uniform postal tariffs, established a single international size of an open letter — 90x140 mm, which operated until 1925. In Russia, the first illustrated postcards appeared in the 1890s. They were black-and-white or colored, printed by lithography, phototype and autotype. The construction of railways, the opening of postal stations, the laying of telegraph lines made it possible to travel long distances and send correspondence, and seasonal flows of holiday-makers allowed to repeat circulations from year to year. The "golden time of the postcard" has come: everyone tried to tell, and if possible, to reinforce the words with images of the unique beauty of places and phenomena.

E.B. Feinstein, a Soviet philocartist and specialist in the history of postcards, proposed the following systematization: postcards (postcards) can be divided into two main categories - postmarked cards and illustrated postcards. Postal marked cards are divided into two groups: without an image (single and with a paid response) and with an image. Illustrated postcards are: 1) reproduction (reproducing works of fine art) and reproduction-documentary (photographs); 2) original (the so-called postcards, the images on which are executed by artists specifically for postcards) ^{[35, p.120]}.

As E.B. Feinstein rightly noted, "postcards are documents of the epoch," and a historical photo document can be a carrier of both expressed and hidden, indirect information. Speaking about photo sources, V.M. Magidov counted among their winning features the ability not only to "stop the moment", but also "the ability, through the information contained in the photo document, not only to represent the event figuratively, but also to comprehend it; the variety of information contained in the photo document creates conditions for an integrated view of reality" ^{[21, p.222]}.

Accordingly, the problem of source criticism of visual sources, databases and banks of their storage is actualized. As V.M. Magidov pointed out, "when reconstructing historical reality, one cannot be content with images alone, trust only them – they must be placed in the system of historical research, subject to careful source analysis, correctly attributed and interpreted, correlated with information obtained from other sources" ^{[21, p.222]}. A comprehensive source-based approach allows us to solve not only a number of source-based tasks to clarify attribution and interpretation of visual sources, but also to replenish specific historical knowledge on the chosen topic.

The problem of accessibility of visual sources

Our development of the topic of sources for studying the development of the Southern coast of Crimea in the late XIX - early XX century.  confirmed the validity of this approach. The southern coast of Crimea with its sea shores, mountains, introduced Mediterranean flora, historical monuments, gave photographers and publishers of postcards a lot of interesting subjects ^[28]. Thus, in the museum collection of the Yalta Historical and Literary Museum there are more than 4 thousand species postcards, including species published before 1917 - 1657 storage units. Not so long ago, a series of albums was published under the auspices of the museum, where many of these postcards were published ^{[28; 33]}. Private collectors traditionally play an important role in the preservation and reproduction of postcards with views of the Southern Coast of Crimea. According to I. Andronnikov, "collecting is one of the most accessible forms of creative work. Large collections are the result of many years of hard, painstaking work, sometimes the work of a lifetime collector" ^{[35, p.120]}. These collections are also increasingly being published as compilations and albums.

However, only a small part of the postcards stored in public and private collections have seen the light until recently and were put into circulation properly. Until recently, historians who want to study postcards and old photographs as a source of comprehensive visual information on the socio–cultural history, the history of everyday life of the Southern Coast of the Crimea of the late XIX - early XIX century. In the XX century, it was necessary to overcome many technical difficulties and formalities, turning to the vaults of museums, libraries, archives or to private collectors in different parts of Russia. It took a lot of time and effort. 

Today, this work is significantly facilitated by the emergence of large-scale online databases of digitized visual sources, which is already being paid attention to in historiography ^[31]. These databases have not yet been sufficiently mastered by historians, although, as the experience of our work with three of them has shown, they present the researcher with quite wide opportunities for information search – however, at the same time they require a critical attitude and placing the published materials in the context of complex source studies.

The databases and data banks that have attracted our attention are different in their origin and history of formation. Firstly, this is a database created on the basis of digitization (digital photographing) of collections of photographs, postcards, works of fine and decorative arts, and other items from the museum fund of the Russian Federation belonging to museum institutions subordinate to the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation in various regions of Russia. Secondly, two crowdsourcing on-line databases of visual and cartographic sources, coupled with GIS systems and tied to specific geographical coordinates – PastiChe and retromap.ru (databases of digitized sources of various types, mainly visual, created on virtual platforms of social networks by communities of amateur historians, about which were discussed in our previous publications ^[12]).

State Catalogue of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation

A real revolution in the researcher's access to museum funds should be recognized as the opening of the website "State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation" under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, where the presentation of digitized storage units of Russian museums, including historical photographs and postcards, is carried out in a user–friendly form.

According to Federal Law No. 54-FZ of 26.05.1996 "On the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation and Museums in the Russian Federation", the State Catalog is a federal state information system for state accounting of museum objects and museum collections included in the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation, created in order to ensure their legal protection and state control. By digitizing (photographing, scanning, etc.) their storage units, museums exhibit them in a publicly accessible State Catalog, equipped with a convenient search engine.

It should be noted that the objects of museum storage can be both written and visual, as well as material sources - in this case, the form into which the information revealed in material sources is translated for further analysis and, subsequently, dissemination of knowledge is important. I.D. Kovalchenko noted that "material monuments, being remnants, relics of reality, undoubtedly, they contain extensive and diverse information about it. However, this information is expressed as a result of practical activity of people and in this respect acts in an objective-syntactic sense, i.e. as traces of practical activity that must be translated into a syntactic-subjective form, or, in other words, expressed in a particular sign system. It can be naturally descriptive, graphically pictorial or otherwise" ^{[20, p.134]}.

On the website of the State Catalog there are both formats - both the image of the storage item and the inscription attributing it.

As the process of digitization of museum collections develops, the number of items in the catalog is constantly replenished. So, if at the beginning of May 2019 in the State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation, when searching for the keywords "Simeiz", "New Simeiz" (the name of the largest summer resort of the early XX century on the Southern coast of Crimea) "with an image" there were 419 items, the vast majority of which are just postcards or published by the printing house if there are specific photographs from the collection of various museums in Russia, dated from the end of the XIX to the second half of the XX centuries, then in 2021 there are already 887 storage units: we are talking about a more than twofold increase in the amount of information. Many of the digitized pictorial documents contain unique information about the peculiarities of development on the lands of the former estate of the nobles of the Maltsov country resort, awaiting introduction into a full-fledged historiographical circulation. Postcards issued before 1920 depict individual cottages of the Novy Simeiz resort with an indication of the owners, general views of the resort and its surroundings. According to the postcards issued after 1920, in Soviet times, it is possible to judge how much the appearance of the resort and the routine of its life changed in Soviet times.

On separate images found by us thanks to the website of the State Catalog in the process of working on the topic of transformation of the cultural landscape of the Southern coast of Crimea in the late XIX - early XX centuries, in the era of the "resort boom" and the organization of new country resorts on the lands of former landlords' estates, it makes sense to dwell in more detail to illustrate the heuristic possibilities expanded thanks to the website of the State Catalog.

Thus, the printed species image "Simeiz" (number in the State Catalog 5490707 ^[26]) by photographer F.P. Orlov from the collection of the Moscow State Research Museum of Architecture named after A.V. Shchusev is almost the only known photographic image of the "Crystal Palace" in the estate of S.I. Maltsov in Simeiz - a bizarre structure, brought in parts from Maltsov 's factories in the Kaluga province in 1849 and burned down by the negligence of the manager in 1889 . Before the publication of this photo in the State Catalog of the Russian Federation, only blurred and unattributed copies of this frame appeared in literature and on the Internet. However, the annotation to the frame in the State Catalog states: "in the background is the villa of L.E. Alexandrova-Dolnik (?)". This is a mistake, Alexandrov's dacha-Dolnik was built much later, in 1914, and in another place ^[18]. In the photo – it is the "Crystal Palace" of S.I. Maltsov, it is characteristic that no other dachas are yet visible, but the vineyards of the Maltsovs are clearly visible, on the site of which the holiday village of Novy Simeiz will later be laid out ^{[13; 15]}.

The identity of the author of the picture is interesting. Fyodor Pavlovich Orlov had a reputation as the first photographer of Yalta: this is what the Yalta mayor V.A. Rybitsky calls Orlov in the book "The Fiftieth Anniversary of Yalta" (1887), in the same place he gives the date of foundation of the Orlov company – 1865. Species photographs make up most of Orlov's legacy. Already in 1872, the 28-year-old photographer was invited to perform an architectural survey of the Eriklik Palace, built near Livadia for Empress Maria Alexandrovna. Orlov actively participated in the public life of Yalta: he was elected a member of the City Duma, a trade deputy of Yalta, treasurer of the Yalta Charitable Society, in 1895 he was awarded the silver medal "For Diligence" ^[28].

A real find for the researcher is a series of slides presented in the State Catalog from the collection of the Moscow "Multimedia Complex of Contemporary Arts" made on the Southern Coast of Crimea in the 1930s by the classic of Soviet reportage photography V.V. Mikosha ^[23]. The photographs perfectly show many features of the former private cottages of the YBK (during the shooting – the buildings of Soviet sanatoriums), now lost or invisible behind the new buildings and overgrown greenery, as well as characteristic scenes of everyday life. The author of these pictures Vladislav Vladislavovich Mikosha (November 25 (December 8), 1909 – December 12, 2004) was an outstanding documentary cameraman, People's Artist of the USSR (1990), winner of three Stalin (State) Prizes (1943, 1949, 1951) and the USSR State Prize (1976). Member of the USSR Cinematographers' Union since 1957. In 1931-1941, he was the operator of the All-Union Film Factory of the Soyuzkino Film Chronicle "Soyuzkinochronika" and the Central Newsreel Studio.

Further, it was thanks to the website of the State Catalog that it turned out that the funds of the Dmitrov Kremlin Museum-Reserve contain family photographs reflecting the life of the last field marshal of the Russian Empire, the Minister of War, Count D.A. Milyutin and his family in the Simeis estate on the Southern Coast of Crimea, which he owned since 1873 and where he spent almost continuously the last decades his life ^[24]. Further development of the topic with the involvement of archival and other documents made it possible to trace the path of part of the archive of D.A.Milyutin, who died in 1912 and bequeathed his Crimean estate to the Red Cross Society. All the worries on this issue were entrusted to the daughter, Countess Olga Dmitrievna Milutina, who was also a trustee of the Simeiz zemstvo Russian school. Olga Dmitrievna fulfilled the will of her parents, appealed to the Yalta Zemstvo council with a request to remove from her the duty of a trustee, leaving 5 thousand rubles. for the maintenance of the school and went to her estate in Dmitrov, Moscow province, where she lived until her death in 1926. In the 1920s, the former house of O.D. Milutina housed the "Museum of Nobility" for some time, which later, together with the funds, became part of the Dmitrov Kremlin Museum-Reserve. As for the archives and memoirs of Milyutin, they, along with the entire furniture of the office, were, according to the will, dismantled and sent to St. Petersburg. There, by the end of 1912, they were placed in one of the halls of the Imperial Nikolaev Military Academy, the honorary president of which Dmitry Alekseevich was during his lifetime — the "Count Milyutin Museum". Now these papers are kept in the department of manuscripts of the Russian State Library ^[14].

Thanks to the website of the State Catalog, numerous sketches of the outstanding architect I.A.Fomin with two projects for the Southern Coast of the Crimea – the garden city of Laspi (1916) and the "Castle of Arts", a summer residence for the famous opera singer F.I.Chaliapin near Gurzuf, which were kept in the funds of the A.V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture and rarely published before, were also released (1915). Both projects reflect the planned, but not implemented due to the outbreak of the First World War and the revolution, the transition to a new stage of resort development of the Southern Coast of Crimea, which was to be determined by a fundamentally new level of urban planning policy inspired by the ideas of "garden cities", the high quality of neoclassical architecture that became fashionable ^[16]. 

Fig. 1. Fomin I.A. F.I. Chaliapin's house in the Crimea ("Castle of Arts").  Preliminary design. The page of the subject of museum storage on the website of the State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation.

"There is a rock in the Crimea, in Suuk-Su, by the sea, bearing the name of Pushkin. I decided to build a Castle of Arts on it. Exactly the castle. I said to myself: kings had castles, knights had castles, why shouldn't artists have castles? With embrasures, but not for deadly weapons," Chaliapin writes in his memoirs ^{[37, p.348]}. According to the plan of I.A.Fomin, traced by sketches published on the website of the State Catalog, Chaliapin's castle on the rock was supposed to consist of two parts — a villa and a high tower, in the upper part of which Chaliapin himself wanted to arrange a bedroom for himself. In one version, there was a tower on the rock, and the villa on the shore, in the other — on the contrary, the tower standing on the shore seemed to guard the entrance to the villa on the rock. A stone bridge was supposed to be thrown between the rock and the shore. The most spectacular of the surviving sheets of Fomin's watercolors with variants of the castle depicted this structure built of roughly processed stones and at the same time elegant in proportions at night, by moonlight. In 1916 and 1917, Suuk-Su Chaliapin, who was vacationing at the Eagle's Nest villa of the Solovyova resort, began preparatory work on the "Castle of Arts", ordered tapestries, and in July 1917, finally issued a bill of sale for the rock and the adjacent plot for 150 thousand rubles from the hostess of the resort: on the map of the rock estate from now on it was supposed to be called "Chaliapinsky Cliff". However, the project was never implemented. Chaliapin, having given a concert for the sailors of Sevastopol in July 1917 and was one of the first to receive the title of Honored Artist of the republic from the new government in 1918, went on tour abroad three years later and never returned to Russia. "I left my dream shattered in Russia. Sometimes people tell me: there will still be some noble art lover who will create your theater for you. I ask them jokingly — where will he get the Pushkin Rock?", — said Chaliapin ^{[37, p.349]}. Today, the rock is located on the territory of the Lazurny camp, which is part of Artek, and a memorial plaque is installed there.

The sketches of the future "garden city" in Laspi Bay prepared by I.A.Fomin in 1916 confirm the high degree of elaboration by the architect of a single stylistic solution of the resort, from the master plan to the design of lanterns and mileposts. Among the structures designed by Fomin in each of the four districts of the future city were hotels, shops, coffee shops; a large hotel, a stadium, the main squares (administrative, shopping, gymnasium square), as well as a theater and a church were to be located in the central district. All areas were connected by a railway line and three radii of funiculars. In the northeast, the economic "Economy of Laspi" was included in the complex: a bakery, a brick factory, residential buildings for construction workers, a fish factory, a hotel, a nursery and a gardening school. The Laspi layout system, for all its orientation to the classics, was free, inscribed in the landscape and relief of the Laspi Bay amphitheater falling to the sea: hence the arc-shaped system of the street network and the radii of the landscaped avenues, and the arc of the railway line crossed by the radii of funiculars. The Master Plan of the Laspi resort, which we discovered during the reconstruction of the history of the development of the Southern Coast of Crimea in the State Archive of the Republic of Crimea, allowed us to clarify these plans of the architect ^[16].

We have listed only a few examples of how the electronic database of images of storage items from the museum fund of the Russian Federation on the website of the State Catalog turns out to be a significant help in the search for visual and material sources. We are sure that in the near future it will become one of the same familiar tools of information search for a historian as electronic catalogs of the largest libraries and archives.

Crowdsourcing platform of retrophotographs of the flock

A large-scale database of visual sources is also the crowdsourcing platform of the Flock (https://pastvu.com ). Its main differences from the database of the State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation are, firstly, that the visual database is linked to a digitized map of the world, that is, it is associated with a GIS - geographical information system, and secondly, that the sources of its formation are not museum collections, but personal archives of private users the Internet.

In the literature, such sites are called crowdsourcing – meaning that an unlimited wide range of people are involved in working on them to use their creative abilities, knowledge and experience in the type of subcontracted work on a voluntary basis with the use of information technology. The large-scale appearance of crowdsourcing Internet platforms is due to the fact that over the past decade informatization – an increase in the volume and role of information, knowledge and information technologies in the life of society – has reached a new level, leading to the emergence of such a format of Internet platforms as Web 2.0. The peculiarity of Web 2.0 is the principle of attracting users themselves to the content and verification of information – the principle of user-generated content, content created not by professional creators for consumers, but by the users of the platforms themselves. Technically, Web 2.0 is defined as a method of designing online systems that, thanks to the calculation of network interactions, become better the more people use them ^[36].

Crowdsourcing practices, as L.I.Borodkin notes, have already become an "important component of digital history", manifesting themselves "in the form of collective participation in online projects to create historically-oriented information resources" ^[2].

How the resource works pastvu.com simple: to place a historical photo of a place in the user's archive in the database, after registering on the platform, it must be digitized and attached to a particular geographical point, setting the direction of shooting and, if desired, accompanied by comments. The system also allows other users to comment on visual materials posted by other users.

According to the author of the project I.Varlamov, "almost 5 years ago I decided to somehow systematize my personal archive of old photographs of Moscow. At first I thought to upload everything to one of the photo hosting sites, but I never found a suitable one. That's when the idea arose to make a separate website where archival images could be placed on the map, indicate the direction of shooting, filter by date, collect different versions of photos, be able to discuss individual images. A few months later, the site "Old Photos of Moscow" appeared. Very quickly, a wonderful community of history lovers gathered around the project. Then we made a separate project on St. Petersburg, which also began to develop rapidly. Dozens of archive images were uploaded to our website every day. And, if in the beginning these were well-known images, then over time people began to scan personal archives, upload unique and rare photos that had not been published anywhere before. Over time, their number exceeded 100,000! Today it is the largest and most convenient collection of archival photographs in the world. You can see how your favorite streets looked in different years, study the history of the costume, look at the assortment and prices of stores in different years, find out how the city has changed. In my blog, I often made collections of archival images. Some of the photos are laid out in high resolution, so they can be printed and decorated with the interior. All this time the project was non-commercial. It was supported by the efforts of one programmer and one technical consultant. Every month for 5 years, my project partner Alexey Duk and I personally paid for hosting and gave out salaries. It was a favorite hobby that pleased thousands of people every day. But at some point the site stopped coping with the increasing load. Readers of my blog have noticed that I have not been giving links to the project for a long time. The thing is that from the slightest influx of visitors, he just fell. Every day we get a lot of questions and comments: someone's password is not restored, someone's photo is not uploaded. We realized that the site needs to be rewritten from scratch, since the old architecture is not able to support such a huge database. In addition, people started demanding branches of the project for their cities, and we decided to expand the boundaries of the resource and make it worldwide. A year ago, we assembled a new team of programmers, completely rewrote the site and launched its new version at PastVu.com (Congregation)" ^[9].

To date, the site pastvu.com It is a unique database of visual data that allows you to work with a lot of photos from personal archives, giving an idea of what certain places of interest in Russia looked like in the past. Importantly, it is also favored by philocartists, who use it to popularize their own collections of old photographs and postcards.

Fig. 2. Retro photos of the Southern coast of the Crimea on the crowdsourcing platform PasvIew (https://www.pastvu.com )

In the course of our work on the reconstruction of the visual appearance of the "places of memory" of the Southern Coast of Crimea, the site of the Flock has repeatedly found its benefits. For example, thanks to the website of the Flock, it was possible for the first time to restore the appearance and location of L.Ya.Tauberg's dacha in the summer resort of Novy Mishor, which existed in 1898-1920. In 1969 , the local historian S.Shantyr in the guide "Mishor. Koreiz. Gaspra" wrote about this dacha: "the decoration of the sanatorium is an old mansion "Dyulberchik", a small figured pool with a decorative crocodile and a gazebo hanging over the sea." The building, whose appearance was captured in several photographs of the pre-revolutionary period, found by us in the digital database of the Flock (reproductions of old postcards with panoramic photos of the entire resort can also be found there), really looks like a miniature copy of the Dulber Palace, built in Mishor by architect N.P.Krasnov in 1895-97 for the great Prince Peter Nikolevich. "Dyulberchik" was demolished at the turn of the 1970s-80s during the construction of a new 16-storey building of the sanatorium "Ai-Petri" (11th building) ^[18].

Visual sources posted on the site play an essential role pastvu.com , played in the reconstruction of the history of the holiday resort Novy Simeiz and the castle "Swallow's Nest" ^{[13; 17]}.

Crowdsourcing cartographic resource RetroMap

According to the crowdsourcing principle , the electronic resource of cartographic information is also arranged - RetroMap (https://www.retromap.ru /). The creators of the RetroMap resource tied the old maps to the coordinate grid and made it possible to get acquainted with them in detail according to the principle of the Google Maps cartographic service. Previously, it was possible to view an old map on the Internet exclusively as a picture, at best, if the map was laid out in high resolution, it was possible to zoom in and study the details, but up to a certain limit. There are much more possibilities on the RetroMap website: you can search on a specific map for a point that corresponds to clear coordinates. But the main thing is the possibility of synchronous viewing and comparison of maps: if you place two maps side by side, a modern and an old one, you can get on the old one a representation of the place that you are studying now on the modern one, and vice versa.

"The idea of this project arose when a lot of old maps accumulated in our collection," writes the creator of the project Sergey Tarasov. — Any old card is a fragile thing and requires careful handling. Every next unfolding of the map causes damage to it .... During the operation of the site, thanks to the support of its visitors, the collection has grown noticeably" ^[10].

At first, we were talking about old maps of Moscow and the Moscow region only, but then the collection was replenished with maps and plans of other Russian cities, major cities and interesting areas of foreign countries. According to the website authors, RetroMap now hosts the largest collection of digitized old maps of Russia available to Internet users. There are maps, plans and diagrams of individual localities and just interesting historical documents that, like maps, can be linked to a coordinate grid.  The set of cards is constantly being updated and increased.

Posted on the resource retromap.ru and digitized maps of the Southern coast of Crimea of different years. Here are some examples of how they helped in our work. So, with the help of one of them, we managed to make significant progress in the reconstruction of the history of the "garden city" project in the estate of G.K.Ushkov Foros ^[16]. In the funds of the RSL, we found an advertising prospectus "Foros City and Garden Resort. Crimea. The Baydar Gate. 1917", printed in Moscow in 1917 in the printing house of A.I.Mamontov on the Arbat. More than half of the advertising prospectus – from 39 to 90 pages – is occupied by a brief description of each of the sites for sale. In total, as can be seen from the prospectus, 200 plots were prepared for sale, from 12 to 200 rubles per sq. sazh. Those wishing to purchase a plot were asked to notify the resort office by sending a form attached to the prospectus filled out, and after waiting for confirmation from the office, they were asked to transfer 25 percent of the cost of the plot to the current account of G.K.Ushkov in the Azov–Don Bank within a week in the form of a deposit.  It is obvious from the text of the prospectus that the plan of the Foros resort was also attached to it, however, in the document stored in the RSL, this plan, alas, is missing. His reproduction was discovered by us on the website retromap.ru ^[27]. Alas, the source of the document's origin is not disclosed on the website - however, a comparative analysis of the map and the brochure allows you to verify its authenticity. Now the location and nature of the plots can be reconstructed much more clearly.

Another example is the map of the German aerial photography of some parts of the Southern Coast of the Crimea, 1942, located on the website, thanks to which it was possible to significantly advance in the localization of the dachas of the first summer resort of the New Mishor YBK (until the early 1980s, the cultural landscape of this area as a whole retained the features laid down during the construction of the summer resort at the beginning of the XX century) ^[18].

Fig. 3. Map of the German aerial survey of the Mishor area in 1942 on the website Retromap.ru

It is obvious that as the popularity of these crowdsourcing platforms grows, new interesting visual sources from private collections will appear in their collections.

Conclusion: new horizons of complex source studies

As I.D. Kovalchenko pointed out, historical sources perform the function of accumulating, storing and transmitting social information about the past reality: from the position of the doctrine of information, everything that is created in the course of people's activities carries information about the diversity of public life and serves as the basis for scientific knowledge is a historical source.

Taking into account the cognitive opportunities provided by modern technology, the role of visual sources in both obtaining and disseminating historical knowledge increases significantly: the examples we have given of the fruitful use of the online database of the State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation, the crowdsourcing platforms of the Flock and retromap.ru . In this sense, the methodology of the systematic approach and structural analysis, methods and techniques of complex source studies are especially important, allowing to reconstruct historical reality through analysis and comparison, verification of information extracted from numerous sources of different types (written, pictorial and material) and types. Today, more than ever, it is appropriate to recall the words of V.L. Yanin: "A proper study of any problem of history should be based not on a specifically limited group of sources .., but on an exhaustive set of these sources or on a sufficiently representative combination of them. Source studies must be comprehensive...  synthesis of sources in a single study is the main means of developing historical science today" ^{[39, pp.22-24]}.