Application of the Theory of Self-organized Criticality to the Analysis of the Liberal Agenda in the Press of 1815-1825.

Латонов В.В., Латонова А.В.

doi:10.7256/2585-7797.2022.3.38752

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Historical informatics

Reference:

Latonov V.V., Latonova A.V. Application of the Theory of Self-organized Criticality to the Analysis of the Liberal Agenda in the Press of 1815-1825. // Historical informatics. 2022. № 3. P. 156-165. DOI: 10.7256/2585-7797.2022.3.38752 EDN: DSJVGG URL: https://en.nbpublish.com/library_read_article.php?id=38752

Application of the Theory of Self-organized Criticality to the Analysis of the Liberal Agenda in the Press of 1815-1825.

Latonov Vasilii Vasilyevich

PhD in Physics and Mathematics

Senior Researcher, Center "Supersonic"

117324, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Leninskie Gory str., 1

WLatonov@gmail.com

Latonova Anastasiia Vyacheslavovna

Applicant, Department of Russian History of the XIX - early XX Century, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Faculty of History

119234, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Leninskie Gory str., 1

iskrenne_vasha_aa@mail.ru

DOI:

10.7256/2585-7797.2022.3.38752

EDN:

DSJVGG

Received:

12-09-2022

Published:

11-10-2022

Abstract: The subject of the research in this paper is the liberal agenda in the Russian press of the pre-Decabrist period. The object of the study is the newspapers published during this period. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that the proposed study searches for pink noise in the data that were obtained from the press of the first quarter of the XIX century. The paper shows that the public consciousness of this period was in a state of self-organized criticality. Previously, the state of self-organized criticality could be found only in systems that arose at the end of the XIX century or later. The difficulty of the problem considered in this paper is that there are almost no mass sources for such an early historical period, and very few of the available ones lend themselves to formalization. The novelty of the conducted research lies in the application of the scientific tool of the theory of self-organized criticality to data having origins in the first quarter of the XIX century. The main conclusion made by the authors of the article is that the public consciousness in the pre-Decabrist period was in a state of self-organized criticality. For the analysis, statistics of publications in newspapers and magazines were collected, which served as a reflection of the liberal agenda relevant to the period of the genesis of the Decembrists. The paper shows that the sequence of publications on liberal information issues in the Russian press in the period 1815-1825 contains pink noise. Fourier analysis was used to determine it in the dynamic series.

Keywords:

liberal agenda, liberalism, press, media, newspapers, the era of Alexander I, Fourier analysis, self-organized criticality, statistics, pink noise
This article is automatically translated.

The conducted research shows that the public consciousness was in a state of self-organized criticality. According to newspaper publications, it can be concluded that the enlightened society was in an unstable state and multiple liberal notes in newspapers only warmed up the public. As already mentioned earlier, it would be wrong to consider exclusively liberal notes in newspapers as the motivating impulse of the Decembrist movement. However, the result obtained in this work can be considered as an additional argument in favor of the fact that in an enlightened society there was a certain predisposition to the events of December 1825.

The lists of newspaper and magazine extracts are available for download at the link:

https://github.com/WLatonov/Self-organized_criticality_database

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Review of the article "Application of the theory of self-organized criticality to the analysis of the liberal agenda in the press of 1815-1825." The reviewed article proposes a method for identifying unstable states in the dynamics of the socio-political process. Specifically, the dynamics of the liberal agenda in the Russian press of 1815-1825 is studied. The number of publications in the materials of four well-known newspapers published in Russia at that time is considered as a parameter characterizing the activity of manifestations of this agenda in the press of the specified decade: Moskovskie Vedomosti, St. Petersburg Vedomosti, Severnaya Pochta and Severnaya Pchela. The author selects about 700 publications in these newspapers reflecting liberal ideas, including the ideas of European constitutions, liberal and democratic values, the immorality of slavery, freedom of the press, the activities of jury trials, etc. The period under study (1815-1825) is chosen as the period from the beginning of political changes in post-war Europe to the Decembrist uprising. The essential advantage of the article is the availability of relevant fragments of all selected materials of the newspapers under study. This access is provided by a link to the corresponding digital resource. The author presented a graph of the monthly dynamics of the number of these publications. The analysis of this dynamics is based on the so-called theory of self-organized criticality (SOC). This theory is part of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems. SOC theory characterizes a special state of a nonlinear dynamical system in which unexpected events can occur (in the corresponding mathematical theory they are called "catastrophes"). In such systems, small impulses can cause large consequences. The author gives historiographical examples in which the theory of SOC was applied in the study of social and political processes (in particular, the works of D.S. Zhukov and S.K. Lyamin, published in the journal Historical Informatics, are mentioned). The "diagnosis" of the presence of the state of SOC in the dynamics of the number of publications within the framework of the "liberal agenda" is carried out by calculating the spectral density of the constructed dynamic series. The problem being solved is reduced to estimating a parameter, the value of which may indicate the so-called "pink noise" characteristic of the state of self-organized criticality. Calculations confirm the presence of "pink noise", which leads the author to conclude that the process under study is unstable. Thus, it is shown that the dynamics of this process really contained prerequisites for an "explosive" change in the nature of the process. It should be noted that the length of the studied dynamic series is insufficient for reliable estimation of the instability parameter, but the author uses an original method of increasing the length of the series using the method of overlapping samples. The author of the article rightly notes that two of the four analyzed newspapers were the largest and most influential (Moskovskie Vedomosti, St. Petersburg Vedomosti) and were published by the Imperial Moscow University and the Imperial Academy of Sciences, which justifies the importance of the formed research source base. The conducted research confirms the hypothesis that public consciousness (the views of the "enlightened public") was in an unstable state and liberal notes in newspapers contributed to a certain extent to the maturation of the event of December 14, 1825. As a single wish, I would like to note that perhaps more attention should be paid to the logic of the method used for a more detailed interpretation of the substantive aspects of the conclusions obtained in the study. The article meets the requirements of novelty and relevance, is written in good language, has a logical structure and a detailed bibliography, is of interest both from the point of view of research methodology and technology, and from the point of view of the results obtained. It will certainly arouse the interest of readers and can be recommended for publication in the journal "Historical Informatics".

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Application of the Theory of Self-organized Criticality to the Analysis of the Liberal Agenda in the Press of 1815-1825.