Abstract: The article considers "Babaevets" newspaper as a source for the USSR food industry history during the first five-year plan. The author studies the issue of formulating the correct methodological approaches for the most complete disclosure of the information potential of the factory press and introduces the materials of a little-studied source (the newspaper of P. A. Babaev’s confectionery factory) into scientific discourse. The article studies the texts of this paper by means of content analysis and network analysis. The study highlights the priority topics that were traced in the newspaper during the first five-year plan, analyzes their internal relationships, both explicit and implicit. The analysis provided for a conclusion that the source understudy is informationally rich as far as food industry history and the impact on workers’ mass consciousness in 1928-1932 are concerned. The author comes to a conclusion that "Babayevets" primarily covered the issues of production process management and ideological work with the staff. The problem of production efficiency was the main connecting element in the content of the newspaper. Special role of all levels of the factory management in achieving the indicators of the first five-year plan was emphasized by the newspaper explicitly and implicitly thus proving the status of the factory newspaper to be an official tool of the party committee. 

Keywords: first five-year plan, MAXQDA, social network analysis, content analysis, factory newspapers, industrialization, Soviet press, narrative historical sources, food industry, Soviet history

Abstract: The article carries out cluster analysis of serial piston-engine fighters. 672 modifications built in 26 countries from 1913 to 1951 are taken into account. Maximum speed, wing load, power load and weight ratio are chosen as coordinates. Clustering reveals pioneering design: the earliest models in each cluster. One can also measure the dynamics of ideas lifetime that is the period when similar aircrafts (those within one cluster) were manufactured following the same methodology. The frequency new clusters emerged demonstrates the speed of technological progress. The author has found the turning points of development. These are 1930 and 1935. Until 1930 flight characteristics were increasing both due to an increase in thrust-to-weight ratio and an increase of wing load. Later the thrust-to-weight ratio remains practically unchanged. In 1935 the first aircraft appeared from three of the 19 clusters at once. Among them are the little-known Yugoslav fighter Ikarus IK-2 and the Soviet I-16 Type 5. The change of leading countries and the lifetime of ideas have been studied as well. The interval between the manufacture of the first and the last model, related to the cluster, corresponds to the time period when designers followed the same approach when designing an aircraft. Between wars, this interval exceeded 10 years whereas during rapid development periods it was 5-6 years shorter.

Keywords: XX century history, R&D in aviation, technology development stages, cluster analysis, historical databases, aircraft design, piston fighters, history of aviation, aircraft industry, arms development

Abstract: The author develops a mathematical-statistical approach to the problem of estimating the size of Genoese medieval population in Byzantium. The data source is notarial acts covering commercial partnerships, freightage, wills, purchase and sale of houses, goods and people drawn up in the Genoese colony of Constantinople at the end of the 13th century. The will form has a fairly uniform structure. In addition to the mandatory record of names of the contracting parties and witnesses of the transaction, it may also register names of the third parties. Thus, these data on the clientele of Genoese notaries represent a dataset which may indirectly indicate the size of the entire trading Genoese community of Byzantium. This approach is based on a constructed formalized model that describes the behavior of merchants when visiting and concluding a transaction attested by a notary. This makes it possible to pass in a natural way from the initial to the statistical problem of estimating the size of a finite aggregate and use this mathematical theory for its calculation. In this case, the author applies the approach associated with the use of the maximum likelihood function that is a novelty. The resulting formula allows (with a certain degree of probability) one to estimate the required size of the Genoese population. It is interesting that this estimate, on the whole, coincides with the result of A.L. Ponomarev obtained earlier for the same problem using Zipf's empirical law.

Keywords: size of a finite population, sample, statistical estimation, ranged series, notarial acts, Genoese, Constantinople, multinomial distribution, maximum likelihood estimation, Zipf’s law

Abstract: The article virtually reconstructs the historical appearance of Moscow Tryokhgorny Brewery production building in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through the decades, Tryokhgorny Brewery held the leading position in the brewing industry of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. This study describes virtual 3D-reconstruction methods applied, addresses the issue of using various source types (narrative, graphical and photographic materials) and considers the issue of data incompleteness. It briefly describes the history of Tryokhgorny Brewery and the subject of research and preservation of industrial heritage. The source base gathered led to the conclusion that its informative potential is enough for creating scientific virtual 3D-reconstruction. As a result, the renders of virtually reconstructed “Varnya” production building were created in Unreal Engine 4 software. In 2006 Tryokhgorny Brewery stopped working and turned into a possible industrial heritage object as its main buildings were constructed in the late 19th century. Historical research and virtual reconstruction of Tryokhgorny Brewery are specifically topical today because despite its importance as an object of industrial heritage it is in danger of complete destruction. .

Keywords: Russian Empire architecture, industrial architecture, Moscow factories, industrial heritage, Badayevsky brewery, Tryokhgorny brewery, virtual 3D-reconstruction, 3D-modeling, 3ds-max, Unreal Engine

Abstract: The article virtually reconstructs Bogoroditsky Park of the Bobrinsky estate located in the city of Bogoroditsk, Tula region. The author briefly describes the history of the city and the estate, the biography of the park creator A. T. Bolotov, presents the results of the analysis of historiographical studies on the history of the development of Russian landscape art and the features of its development in the 18th century. Some paragraphs of the article study the formation of a complex of historical sources that served the basis for reconstruction, their criticism, as well as methods and technologies for creating a virtual reconstruction of the park ensemble of the Bobrinsky estate. The author illustrates the article with still frames of the virtual reality created. The virtual reconstruction of Bobrinsky estate park ensemble is one of the first works within the frames of historical 3D modeling where the landscape park is the central research object. The result of the work is the virtual reconstruction of the A. T. Bolotov's Park on the territory of the Bobrinsky estate in Bogoroditsk. The project is of quite great practical importance since the study addresses the federal level object. The virtual reconstruction can be used in the Bogoroditsky Palace-Museum and park as well as the State Historical Museum where an album of A. T. Bolotov's watercolors is kept. In addition, the project could become the basis for a real reconstruction of the park in Bogoroditsk.

Keywords: 3D modeling, cultural heritage, Bogoroditsk, Bolotov, Bobrinsky, Tula region, regular park, landscape park, manor, virtual reconstruction

Abstract: Historical interiors of manor complexes as one of the main forms of spatial organization of life in the Russian Empire in the 18th – early 20th centuries are unique historical monuments that unite both social and individual elements charactering everyday life of the privileged classes of the Russian Empire. Stylistically and compositionally, historical interiors of Moscow Oblast manor complexes have a special place increasingly attracting the attention of Russian history and culture researchers. However, today most of Moscow Oblast manor complexes are ruined and their interiors are completely lost. The latest computer technologies grant unique opportunities for their virtual 3D-reconstruction and further preservation. The article generalizes types of interiors of Moscow Oblast manor complexes of the 18th – early 20th centuries and describes the transformation of t interiors throughout the main periods of classical manor complex culture development. The author clarifies a ceremonial interior type by the example of Nikol’skoe-Uryupino manor (Krasnogorsk district, Moscow region, Russia) and reconstructs the interiors in the Main Building and the White House by collecting an extensive database of visual and textual historical sources. The result of this work is 3D-reconstruction of the main ceremonial interiors of Nikol’skoe-Uryupino manor made in Autodesk 3DsMax and visualized in Corona Renderer software. The research was conducted in collaboration with the Central State Archive of Moscow Oblast.

Keywords: cultural heritage, Autodesk 3DsMax, Moscow Region, Nikol’skoe-Uryupino ex-manor, manor, virtual reconstruction, historical interiors, nobility, 3D-modelling, digitization of cultural heritage

Abstract: The article addresses crime dynamics in European Russia provinces (guberniyas) in 1896-1912 accounting for data on the number of convicts. It studies regional features of the process as well as its differences from the general dynamics in the Russian Empire. The focus is two groups of convicts. The first one is those sentenced for personal crimes, the second one is those sentenced for property offences. The author has created thematic maps distributing convicts within guberniyas in 1896 and 1912. Moreover, she has correlated this information with the data on the size of the urban, rural and working population at the beginning and the end of the period and has visualized the dynamics of the convict number growth in 10 guberniyas of different regions of European Russia. The article concludes that the regional dynamics of the convict number growth differs from that characteristic of the Russian Empire as a whole. A GIS method applied has demonstrated that guberniyas grouped by convict numbers are similar at the beginning and the end of the period understudy. The author has revealed a correlation between the number of convicts sentenced for personal crimes and property offences. Moreover, taking into account the number of property convicts the study demonstrates rapid increase of the number of property offences by the end of the period understudy.  

Keywords: crimes against property, crimes against the person, crime of the Russian empire, historical gis, crime statistics, judicial statistics, dynamics of crime, GIS, correlation analysis, number of convicts

Abstract: The article studies St. Petersburg Stock Exchange speculator’s economic thinking at the beginning of the 20th century. It finds out how market participants analyzed fundamental (or economic) and speculative / irrational pricing factors to make trade decisions. The author primarily addresses the way the market was perceived by its agents. He makes content analysis and network analysis to create the matrix of perception by identifying connections in categories of economic thinking. The main idea of the study is its address to the level of trade decision formation. Describing the stock exchange life in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, the author attempts to see how trade participants understood the way the stock exchange market functioned. Based on the results of the study, two key findings are formulated. According to I.P. Manus, the fundamental factors of the economic process are a part of the concept of the perfect economy which the real economy strives for. The main distortion that prevents this utopia from coming true is the human factor: the desire for easy money that leads one to a financial crime; artificially maintained information asymmetry; the stupidity and emotionality of the "crowd" which is the "eternal" victim of a cynical speculator, etc. At the same time, it turned out that any speculative strategy presupposes (in the reflexive model of Manus) the exploitation of fundamental mechanisms (such as "liquidity" or "supply volume") through the creation of barriers to the functioning of the perfect economy.

Keywords: network analysis, content analysis, practice theory, economic thinking, speculation, St. Petersburg Stock Exchange, behavioral finance, stock market, efficient-market hypothesis, pricing

Abstract: In many Russian nature reserves traditional landscapes are objects of important historical and cultural heritage. To preserve and restore them one needs to deeply understand their development, formation and degradation processes. In the north of European Russia agricultural landscapes are often covered with forests and lose their features when agricultural activity decreases. However, structural characteristics of these forests as a rule tell us about their development and peculiarities of successions. The study aims at creating a technique to estimate the scope of former agricultural land development, model historical transformation of agricultural landscapes and identify plots of slash and burn, shifting, two and three field agriculture judging by structural characteristics of post-agrarian forests. Aided by GIS the study compares raster analogs of land demarcation plans of the second half of the 19th century and vector layers of present day forests with attributive data on the forest structure. The use of cartographic forest data and inventory forest characteristics to compare with former land management documents related to the plot named have not been found in studies before. High precision of present day land management provides for permitted comparability with old demarcation plans and allows one to use inventory data for inter-landscape differentiation of agricultural landscapes in the 19th century. The study covers a model plot within Kenozero National Park (Arkhangelsk Region) addressing 1861 demarcation plans and 2014 forests GIS developed by Arkhangelsk branch of Roslesinforg. GIS processing of 19th century and present day demarcation plans provides for modeling agricultural landscape changes in relation to separate plots, trace the influence of soil conditions and elements of agrarian use on topological and inventory changes of emerging forests and reconstruct the biodiversity of ecosystems in the past.

Keywords: inter-landscape differentiation, forest management plans, demarcation plans, early GIS data, ecological and historic transformation, agricultural landscapes, land types, taxational specifications of forest stock., arable land, fallow

Abstract: The article analyzes the conference held online by the German company VERBI Software GmbH - a developer of the well-known MAXQDA software designed for computerized content analysis of texts. Over the past decade Russian undergraduate and graduate students have been actively using this program in their research work as evidenced by a number of publications including in the "Istoricheskaya Informatika" journal. The author focuses on the dynamics of topics of the annual 2019-2021 conferences and characterizes the latest online conference. The author draws attention to the fact that the online status of the conference resulted in a sharp increase in the number of participants in comparison with previous traditional conferences. The novelty of this study is the fact that the author compares the reports of three conferences focusing on the range of methodological and methodical issues of computerized text analysis, constant update of research tools, new trends in the provision of educational materials to program users including open access to Maxqda Press publications. The article provides useful links to conference materials posted both on the developer's website and on YouTube. The author pays attention to those tools (platforms for online conferences) which are used by software developers to attract the maximum number of participants: free conference registration, user-friendly interface and international aware work (9 languages).

Keywords: presentations, seminars, discussions, online format, software, content analysis, methods, tools, conferences, publications