Teaching Informatics and Mathematics to History Students: Experience of Lobachevsky University of Nizhny Novgorod

Akasheva Anna Anatol'evna PhD in History Associate professor, Information Tecnhologies in Humanities Department, Lobachevskiy State University of Nizhniy Novgorod  603005, Russia, Nizhegorodskaya oblast', g. Nizhnii Novgorod, ul. Ul'yanova, 2, of. 326 annakasheva@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The issues of teaching information technologies and mathematical methods at the historical faculties of Russia have repeatedly become the object of close attention of researchers – at the biennial conferences of the Association "History and Computer" there is a permanent section in which theoretical and practical aspects of teaching students of history in relevant disciplines are discussed ^[1]. Increasingly, these issues are being included in the broader scientific agenda on the digital transformation of university education, as was the case, for example, in the report by Galina Vasilyevna Mozhaeva (HSE) at the last January AIC seminar. At the same time, the comprehension of the experience of teaching disciplines of the information and mathematical cycle (the name proposed by us) in a regional university for a long chronological period does not occur so often. Our article is devoted to just such a retrospective analysis of the teaching of the disciplines of the information and mathematical cycle at the Faculty of History of Nizhny Novgorod State University named after N.I. Lobachevsky (hereinafter - Lobachevsky University or UNN) from the 1980s to the 2020s. The study was performed using a set of methods including analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, description and measurement. Quantitative calculations were performed in MS Excel.

The article is based on a number of sources: appendices to higher education diplomas for different years of graduation, starting from 1983 to 2020, professional educational standards (State and Federal State Educational Standards of the first, second and third generation from 1995 to 2020) in history, bachelor's and master's degree curricula in the field of History from 2013 to 2023 years, work programs of the disciplines (RAP) of the mathematical cycle of the Bachelor's degree for 2015 and 2017, the journal of registration of term papers and graduation papers of students at the Department of Information Technology in the Humanities (ITGI) from 2007 to the present, as well as regulations on the development programs of the National Research University (NRU Program, Project 5-100, Priority 2030). A special place is occupied by the memories of fellow teachers, who, at the request of the author of the article, answered questions about who and when taught subjects related to mathematics and information technology, how useful the knowledge they gained was in their professional activities.

The object of the analysis was the names and hourly volume of disciplines of the information and mathematical cycle from 1984 to 2023, the names of final qualifying works performed at the ITGI department from 2007 to 2023, the names of teaching aids for 2010 to 2023.

The study has a number of limitations and features: the collected data contain temporary gaps and therefore, for a comprehensive scientific analysis, they need additional information that can be extracted from the educational documentation stored in the archive of the UNN; data analysis was performed only for full-time (full-time education) of the specialty, bachelor's and master's degrees by academic, and not by calendar years; the dimension of disciplines is indicated in academic hours, their total labor intensity, i.e., taking into account lectures, seminars, tests, exams, tests and independent work of the student; based on the curriculum, the disciplines are divided into the mandatory part (OCH), the variable part (HF) and the disciplines of the student's choice (DV).

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In September 1984, the Fundamental Library of Gorky State University (GSU) received ten copies of the first textbook for historians "Quantitative Methods in Historical Research", edited by I.D. Kovalchenko ^[2]. The very next year, 1985, sophomore historians attended the course of the same name. His teacher was a young assistant at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History, Sergey Viktorovich Subbotin, who had just got a job at GSU. He graduated with honors from Bauman Moscow State Technical University and, naturally, this course was given to him. According to the memoirs of the teacher himself, the course was a semester and lasted 36 hours. With the publication in 1987 of I.D. Kovalchenko's monograph "Methods of historical research" ^[3], the discipline was expanded due to the materials of this publication. Thus, Ivan Dmitrievich's books served as a basis for introducing students of history of the State University to the possibilities of using mathematical methods in the study of the past.

This is how Sergey Viktorovich characterizes the experience of teaching this course: "Students listened to it with interest (although not without difficulties: for the "humanitarian" mind, mathematics is something, to put it mildly, unusual). And for me, it was one of my favorite and interesting courses: because of the attractiveness of overcoming the above-mentioned difficulties and as a reminder of my engineering and technical past. One of my graduate students used a mat. the apparatus (i.e., "acquired knowledge") in his thesis, wrote a brilliant work (analysis of presidential campaigns in the United States), in which he revealed an amazing statistical relationship between the financial costs of candidates and the results obtained, compiled a correlation table and calculated the correlation ratio. The defense made an impression!" Sergey Viktorovich wrote this answer by mail in response to my request to share his memories.

For students of the humanities, the course was really difficult to master, which is confirmed by the memories of colleagues who listened to it in 1986-1987 and in 1993-1994: "these courses were just being introduced, there were no manuals or textbooks... I regularly attended all lectures and carefully wrote everything down, but these disciplines somehow did not stick in my head at all" and "everything went to the sand for us."

The course on quantitative methods was taught until 1995-1996. In 1997, according to the collected data, it was replaced by another one – "Modern computer technologies in science and education" (48 hours).

In addition to the course on quantitative methods in 1985, another subject of the information and mathematical cycle, "Computers and programming", was added to the curriculum for the training of historians. According to the memoirs of colleagues, it was taught by teachers from the Faculty of Higher Mathematics and Cybernetics of the State University, the course was theoretical in nature, because the main difficulty of practical teaching was the lack of historians of machines on which to teach students the basics of programming. By 1997, a computer class with personal computers had already appeared on the third floor of the Istfakovsky building, on Ulyanova Street 2/2, in the building of UNN No. 14, so computers were "taught to turn on/off in practical classes:)))" - so say colleagues who studied at that time. For comparison, the first personal computers at the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University in the Laboratory of Historical Informatics, which belonged to the Department of Source Studies, were installed in 1988 ^[4], that is, about nine years earlier than the UNN Faculty of History was computerized.

In the 2000s, the situation with the quality of teaching has not changed fundamentally - a graduate of the bachelor's degree in 2008 recalls that "Mathematics and Computer Science ... was pure mathematics without any participation of computers and computer science, and Computer Technologies taught us to format text in word." Compared with the 1980s and 1990s, when quantitative methods were tailored to the needs of historical research, there was a rollback to teaching the basics of higher mathematics for humanities faculties, and when studying disciplines related to computer technology, teachers had to pull history students up to an elementary level of proficiency in Windows Explorer and MS Word text editor, in which it would be possible to collect term papers and theses. There was no need to talk about advanced programs that allowed solving specialized tasks of analyzing historical sources. As a result, a colleague summarized: "To summarize, during my studies in 2004-2010. (bachelor's and master's degrees – AA) we were not actually taught anything about information technology."

However, perhaps this is just a subjective assessment. Objective factors can be traced if we observe the changes in the names of subjects of the information and mathematical cycle over time. Thus, "Quantitative methods" were transformed into "Mathematics and Computer Science" (2005-2006), and those, in turn, into "Mathematical Methods in Historical Research" (2015-2016). Consequently, from 1985 to 2024, the teaching of information technology for a historian became more specialized, and the importance of statistical processing increased However, dissatisfaction with the results of a colleague's studies from 2004 to 2010 is explained by a methodological "pit" when mathematics and computer science were as far as possible from the practical needs of a student of the Faculty of Economics.

The subject "Computers and programming" changed its name more often: "Computers and Programming" (1985-1986) ? "Computer Science and PC" (1993-1994) ? "Mathematics and Computer Science" (2005-2006) ? "Computer Science" (2014-2015) ? "Information Technology in the Humanities" (2018 to the present). This reflected the orientation of education towards the increasing needs of the humanities in digital technologies and the movement towards strengthening the applied aspects of computer science by reducing attention to the theoretical aspects of computing machines and high-level programming.

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The Master's degree in History at UNN was opened in 1996. At that time, the information and mathematical cycle of subjects consisted of one course "Computer Technologies in science and Education" (84 hours), which was part of the curriculum. For twenty-one years, undergraduates were taught about information technology only within the framework of this discipline. In 2017, the situation changed. Due to the university's participation in the implementation of the state program of support for the largest Russian universities to increase their competitiveness in the global scientific and educational market (Program 5-100) ^[5] the digital competencies of undergraduate historians have significantly expanded. From 2017 to 2019, the program "Information Technologies in historical research" was implemented once in the direction 46.04.01 "History". Then the students were asked to master, in addition to one discipline in the OCH, eleven more new subjects in the HF and in the DV block. As a result, starting next year 2018 and up to the present moment, the program "Universal and National History" has five disciplines of the student's choice, and the discipline "Statistical methods and databases in historical research" took its place first in the HF curriculum, and since 2022 it has moved to mandatory.

The name of the main "information" subject in the training of undergraduates in history has undergone the following changes since 1996: Computer technology in science and education ? Computer Technologies in Historical Science (2007) ? Historical Informatics in Russia and abroad: methods and technologies of data analysis (2013-2017) ? Information technologies in Historical research (2017 - present). This series shows that in the second stage of historical education over the past twenty-eight years, information technology has become more specialized and practice-oriented, as well as in the first.

The dynamics of the proportion of all disciplines of the information and mathematical cycle from the total complexity of bachelor's and master's degree programs indicates, on the one hand, their very, very modest place in the training of a historian, 2% and 15% (although the last figure is not so small!) Accordingly, on the other hand, it shows a positive effect from the purposeful development of second-level education at UNN since 2009. Then he received grant support from the President of the Russian Federation within the framework of the system of national research universities ^[6], in 2013 it continued in the 5-100 Program, and in 2021 it moved to the Priority 2030 program ^[7]. These data are clearly reflected in the graph in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Changes in the labor intensity of information and mathematical cycle subjects in training programs for specialists, bachelors and masters of history (% ak. hours of the total labor intensity of the program)

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All the disciplines of the information and mathematical cycle in the bachelor's and master's degrees available in the 2023-2024 academic year are summarized in one table (see Table 1):

Table 1. Disciplines of the information and mathematical cycle in the preparation of undergraduate and graduate students in the field of "History" at IMOMI UNN, 2023-2024 academic year

 Currently, the bachelor's curriculum includes two disciplines included in the mandatory part – "Information Technology in the humanities" and "Internet resources in historical science and education", a total of 180 hours or 2% of the total labor intensity of the program. The first of them is taught in the first year in the spring semester, the second in the second year in the fall semester. Within the framework of information technology, as ten years ago, the basics of editing coursework in MS Word, multimedia presentations in MS PowerPoint, as well as the simplest ways to process historical source data in MS Excel are studied using the example of primary analysis of time series dynamics. Now there is no need to teach the functionality of office programs – basic knowledge is acquired at school and, therefore, it is possible to focus on the design part of research papers, preparing student presentations and showing the capabilities of the spreadsheet editor.

One of the last topics introduced into teaching in this course was initiated by the epidemiological situation in 2020, when electronic correspondence between teachers and students increased dramatically and it was necessary to teach the latter the skills of digital etiquette in interaction with the supervisor through the university's electronic services, mail and messengers.

The main difficulty in the development of the subject lies, in my opinion, in two factors – the lack of jobs in the computer classroom (today there are 9 computers per group of students from 25-29 people, until 2023-2024 there were 6 machines), and – most importantly – in an excessively broad orientation of the discipline, which does not allow in-depth study of work technologies in statistical packages, geographic information systems, graphics editors, etc. The existing level of differentiation of computer programs is such that it urgently requires a differentiated approach to teaching in the form of separate courses already at the bachelor's level, without waiting for the master's degree.

The intermediate course assessment is an oral answer to several questions on topics mastered during the semester, in a blitz format.

The course on Internet resources in historical science and education appeared in the curriculum in 2016, replacing "Mathematical Methods in Historical Research", which were first moved to the HF, and in 2018 completely disappeared from the curriculum for the training of historians at IMOMI National University. The course is based on familiarization with the basic concepts and structure of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). His main pathos lies in the development of critical thinking skills regarding historical content that is available on the Web and the ability to analyze sites, highlighting scientific, popular and popular among them.

The range of topics discussed with students has been quite stable for a long time, however, this academic year (winter 2023), for the first time, the topic of text generative model services and, more broadly, artificial intelligence as an assistant to the historian was introduced.

Over time, there has been a tendency to narrow students' perceptions of the institutional resources of historical science – the official websites of historical faculties (humanities institutes, schools where history is present), research institutes in the field of history of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They prefer to receive all institutional information and, accordingly, an idea of the electronic resources of those departments where students study from the pages of the latter on social networks. I would also like to say about the complete ignorance of a whole segment of non-profit public scientific and cultural educational organizations in the field of history and their websites, which are clearly underestimated resources in historical education, since they represent a powerful channel of horizontal scientific communication and a rich breeding ground for the rapid professional growth of students.

The intermediate certification on Internet resources is carried out in the form of an oral ticket response to one of the questions of the course.

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The list of disciplines of the information and mathematical cycle in the master's degree in history (direction 46.04.01 "History", training profile "Universal and National History") currently includes seven subjects (Table 1), which is 15% of the time spent on training. The annotations of the work programs of the six disciplines, as well as the work programs themselves, can be found at the link ^[8], where previously in the opened table it is necessary to find the specialty code 46.04.01 using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+F.

The course on information technology, read by the author of the article, is a theoretical and historiographical description of modern research areas in history and partly archaeology, in which computer methods are used. The general plan for studying each topic includes an introduction to technology, the history of its formation, the software with which it is implemented, then the advantages and disadvantages of the technology are described. The practical classes cover relevant publications of recent years, mainly from the journal "Historical Informatics", as well as the most striking and illustrative projects available on the Web.

The thematic plan of the course includes familiarization with the following technologies: databases, geoinformation systems, network analysis, content analysis, virtual reconstructions. The topic of institutionalization of digital technologies in history within the framework of historical informatics and digital humanities or digital humanities is also discussed, the place and role of the historical source in the modern digital environment is discussed, the issues of digital transformation of historical education in higher education are touched upon.

The main problem of teaching this course is that it is of an overview nature. Knowledge about computer methods remains theoretical and, as a result, unrealized in students' research – they come to their supervisors and write papers based on traditional approaches, without trying to increase the information return of the research source base. Scientific supervisors, in turn, are not ready to offer undergraduates to try computer methods, because they do not own them or do not know about them. It is possible that the undergraduates themselves also do not puzzle the leaders with such a statement of the question, showing passivity and knowledge. The author has not conducted any special research on this topic and it is quite difficult to definitively confirm anything.

It seems that it is impossible to single out any one leading technology that would attract the primary attention of students, it seems that virtual reconstructions are perceived easier due to greater clarity of the result, as well as geoinformation systems are more interested, because there is an understanding of the connection between an event and a place in history and the possibility of reflecting them on an electronic map.

The intermediate certification is conducted in the form of an oral interview on tickets formed from topics studied during the semester. The skills of mastering a specific technology are not evaluated due to the overview nature of the course.

For the last three years, starting in 2021, in practical classes, students, under the guidance of a teacher, have been preparing web maps based on Google Maps and Google Earth, immersing themselves in the problems of geoinformation systems and learning to work in a distributed team of like-minded people using cloud web services. The online nature of the Master's degree allows for such a format. Examples of prepared projects are available at the links ^[9] and ^[10], the first one has been going on for two years. The introduction of project activities can be assessed as the most significant update of the subject for the entire time of teaching this discipline since 2014.

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The development of digital competencies of historians within the framework of bachelor's and master's degrees is carried out by teachers of the Department of ITGI and IMOMI UNN. It was organized in 2007 and since that time it has been headed by Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Alexey Andreevich Mironos.  Initially it was called the Department of Methodology of History and Historical Informatics, since 2014, due to the restructuring of the Faculty of History, the department was renamed and bears its current name as part of the Institute of International Relations and World History. Initially, the department employed 5 people, including two candidates and two doctors of historical Sciences. By 2024, the staff of the department expanded to 7 people, of whom two freelance staff (part–time) - associate professor, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, and a teacher- specialist in the field of computer technology.

The true wealth of the department, along with the teaching staff, is the students specializing in it. From 2007 to 2023, 86 specialists, bachelors and masters of full-time history were graduated, information about computer methods in final qualifying works (WRC) of which are collected in Table 2.

Table 2. The number of graduates of the Department of ITGI IMOMI NNSU from 2007 to 2023 with the distribution of their work on the applied computer research methods

 According to the table, 69% of the papers were prepared without using any quantitative or computer methods, and among those in which they were used, data counting using MS Excel prevailed. Over time, the number of protected WRC with the use of information technology has varied non-linear (see Fig. 2). Filtering the graph at two points revealed peaks of 2009, 2019, and 2022 They can be explained by the banal large number of graduates in these years, and, consequently, by the large number of students who initially showed interest in using computer methods earlier in their term papers.

Fig. 2. The dynamics of the WRC of graduates of the Department of Information Technology in Humanitarian studies performed using quantitative and computer methods, 2009-2023.

To ensure the educational process, the teachers of the department prepared 5 teaching aids in 2010-2023. To date, only one of the two bachelor's degree disciplines has been provided with benefits, and none in the master's degree. On the intra-university platform e-learning.unn.ru There are, however, electronic courses in all disciplines of the information and mathematical cycle and bachelor's and master's degrees.

In 2017-2019, the department once implemented its own master's degree program in history called "Information Technology in Historical Research" (full-time). Since 2023, the implementation of the new program "Digital archives in state and municipal administration and the socio-cultural sphere" has begun in the direction 46.04.02 "Documentation and archival science" in a mixed (face-to-face and remote) format.

The department has the following information infrastructure: the Internet page on the IMOMI website (http://www.imomi.unn.ru/about/struktura/kafedryi/283-kafedra-informacionnyh-tehnologij ) and a group on the VKontakte social network (https://vk.com/inftech_unn ). The VKontakte page has been maintained since 2016 by the editorial board, which includes teachers and students of the department.

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The presented analysis of bachelor's and master's degree programs and courses over the past forty years has shown that mathematical methods and digital (computer, information) technologies are not leading in the training of historians at IMOMI UNN. The profession of a historian in the form in which it is taught at our university is a profession built primarily on the ability to study and analyze a source, gaining new knowledge about the past by traditional methods. However, the rapid development of the digital environment in society has greatly influenced the formation of those information competencies of students of history who are responsible for the critical perception of digitized historical sources and their publication/ (co)storage in various formats and on various sites on the Internet.

The author expresses gratitude to colleagues S.V. Grigorieva, M.V. Medovarov, A.A. Mironos, Yu.V. Sokolov, A.P. Shmelev, and E.E. Baskakova (Fundamental Library of Lobachevsky University) for providing information on teaching information and mathematical disciplines to students of history. Special thanks to S.V.Subbotin for valuable facts about the formation of teaching quantitative methods at the UNN Faculty of History.