History of the Mari Region and local Mari groups in the reflection of the latest Russian historiography: experience of social network modeling

Pavlov Kirill Vital'evich ORCID: 0000-0002-0270-8585 Postgraduate student; Department of Information Technologies in Humanitarian Studies; N.I.Lobachevsky National Research Nizhny Novgorod State University Ulyanova str., 2, office 326, Nizhny Novgorod region, 603005, Russia pavlov_kirill_2015@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The distinctive and in many ways unique history of the Mari ethnic group has always attracted the close attention of both domestic and foreign scientists. The study of various aspects of ethnogenesis, religion, language and other aspects of Mari's past has long-standing historiographical traditions. According to experts, at the modern, post-Soviet stage of research, interest in regional history has only increased ^{[1, pp. 71-73]}, which was reflected in the growing number of diverse materials on the history of the Mari Territory and local Mari groups. The topic outlined above has been experiencing a real information boom in recent decades, having received wide coverage not only in the academic environment, but also in various media and online resources. The dynamic growth in the number of publications discussing various aspects of the history of the Mari Territory and local Mari groups makes it very important to identify the main trends in the development of this subject area at the present stage. It cannot be said that the latest Mari historiography has been ignored by experts. A number of works can be noted that analyze individual historiographical subjects: the development of ethnological research in Mari El ^[2-3], the problems of periodization of the historiography of the history of the region ^[4], as well as the historiography of narrower topics: the history of science and higher education in the region ^[5-6], the history of law enforcement and judicial authorities in the region ^[7], etc.

At the same time, from the point of view of significant methodological transformations of modern historical science, along with traditional techniques of historiographical analysis, it seems promising to use interdisciplinary approaches to studying arrays of publications, including using quantitative methods and information technologies. Currently, there are few works based on the use of such methods for the analysis of historiography. We note the publications of such a researcher as I.M. Garskov ^[8-9], as well as the author of these lines ^[10].

This article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the scientific literature of the above-mentioned subject area through the prism of sustainable scientific communications. As a result of using this approach, it was possible to identify a fairly detailed "topography" of the scientific field under study and identify the most popular research topics. Also, based on the quantitative analysis of citations and the technology of social network modeling, key scientific publications were identified and the system of their interrelations was considered.

Research methodology

The theoretical basis of the methodology of social network analysis of historiography developed by us was described in detail earlier ^{[10, pp. 164-166]}. On the portal of the Scientific Electronic Library eLibrary.A selection of Russian scientific publications on the subject under study has been compiled. We searched for the following words (phrases): "Mari(ytsy)", "Gorny Mari(ytsy)", "Cheremis", "Mari Territory", "Mari ASSR", "Tsarevokokshaysk", etc. These phrases were searched in the title, annotation and keywords of two types of publications – articles in journals and conference materials, as having the shortest publication period and containing the latest scientific facts and information, which makes it possible to analyze trends in the development of the subject area under study. As a result, we received a selection of 627 articles in journals, as well as conference collections, abstracts, and articles in collections from 2010 to 2019, authored by more than 270 experts in historical and related disciplines. Additionally, the analysis and selection of publications in the personal profiles of scientists (138 personal pages – not all authors are registered in the system) engaged in research on this topic were carried out. In the process of compiling a selection of articles, we also analyzed bibliographic references (more than 610 mentions) to the found publications.

To visualize the results of quantitative citation analysis, we used the technology of social network modeling implemented in the Gephi program (version 0.9.2.), one of the most popular open source software packages for network analysis and visualization. Also, to substantiate the representativeness of the study sample, another visualization method was used – creating a word cloud using the R programming language in the R Studio program.

The results of the study, reflected in the form of a social network model that reveals the system of scientific communication in the studied subject area, were publicly available in the online repository GitHub ^[11]. This electronic resource is gradually gaining popularity among historians, who use it to better present the results of their research using mathematical methods and computer technology. In this study, GitHub's capabilities give readers the opportunity to interactively interact with a built-in network of citations of scientific papers on the history of the Mari Region and local Mari groups. The created social network model was designed as a public repository "Historiography of the Mari Region and local Mari groups", which is available for viewing by all GitHub users. By clicking on the above link, the reader can get acquainted with the characteristics of the network graph, its structure, as well as use a number of additional tools, including keyword search for publications, access to publication names, their interrelationships, scaling the structure of the graph of connections, etc.

The author sees the limitations of the methodology described above in the very formal nature of such a scientometric indicator as citation, especially taking into account its specifics in the socio-humanitarian sciences. Also, the experience of working with bibliographic indexes of scientific works of Marniiyali allowed us to identify two more factors that, of course, also put the degree of relevance of the results of this study within a certain framework ^[12-14]. First, the question of the completeness of the coverage of publications and their metadata in the Russian bibliographic database of the Russian Research Center for the period 2010s remains largely open. Secondly, one of the features of research on the history of the Mari Territory and the Mari ethnic group is that some of the literature on the subject is published in the official languages of the Republic of Mari El (in addition to Russian, they also include Lugovomari and Gornomari languages) and, accordingly, is only partially indexed in the system eLIBRARY.RU .

It is also worth noting another factor influencing the relevance of the results of this study – the presence of a fairly significant number of self-citations (just over 200). In our opinion, this is due to the fact that the author's team in the studied subject area is concentrated mainly in narrow groups that have been studying various aspects of the history of the Mari Territory and local Mari groups for a long time. Therefore, numerous self-citations are aimed at mentioning their previous research, which is necessary for understanding the work (that is, they represent a form of scientific "autocommunication"). Of course, this factor influenced the network of citations we built, which reflected, for the most part, the publications of the above-mentioned research groups.

The methodology of the study sample formation and its characteristics

Analysis of bibliometric indicators of the collection on eLibrary.RU showed that out of the total number of publications, only 246 papers are cited. At the same time, the number of citations is extremely unevenly distributed throughout the collection. For example, there are 72 articles with 3+ citations (i.e. 11.5%), but they collectively account for 380 bibliographic references (more than 62% of all citations). In our opinion, this sample of data is quite representative for subsequent analysis, since viewing the selection of papers showed that there are practically no new authors (or groups of authors) among publications with fewer citations, as well as actively developing research topics compared to the sample of 72 papers.

Additionally, the representativeness of this data sample was proved by us using the technology of creating a word cloud using the R programming language in the R Studio program. This visualization method is very effective, as it allows you to identify the frequency of occurrence of words in the studied text and determine the size of each word in proportion to its frequency. The titles of all 627 publications included in the collection were combined into a single text array. Later, its lemmatization was carried out on a third–party resource and the removal of a large number of stop words, as well as words that do not carry a significant semantic load within the framework of the conducted historiographical analysis. Next, using the word cloud library, a cloud of 150 of the most frequently encountered terms was built (see Figure 1). Analysis of this cloud of words showed that the selected 72 scientific publications well reflect the most popular research topics from the socio–political, economic, military and other fields of the past of the Mari Territory and local Mari groups. In particular, it is clearly noticeable that a large number of terms are related to archeology. First of all, these are the names of the Mari burial grounds of the Middle Ages and their burial equipment. It is also worth highlighting the words related to research on military subjects (the Mari Territory during the First World War and the Great Patriotic War), the history of forestry in the Mari Territory, education and the Mari traditional religion.

Fig. 1. A word cloud based on the analysis of the headlines of publications

The articles included in the data sample are distributed chronologically from 2010 to 2019, thus covering the entire study period. The largest number of articles fall in 2012-2013 and 2015-2016 (18 and 27, respectively). The 72 articles we selected, as well as all the works (as from the collection in eLibrary.RU, which were never added to it), referring to them, were entered into the Gephi program data table. The submitted publications are nodes of the network graph. Nodes are interconnected by means of edges that reflect bibliographic references between articles. The total number of nodes in the graph was 354, and the edges were 407. Thus, an oriented graph was created that well visualizes the connections between scientific publications ^[11]. The node sizes were set depending on the number of citations available.

As a result of building a social network model that visualizes the system of scientific communication in the studied subject area of Russian historiography, we have identified thirteen large clusters of publications (the most popular research topics), each of which contains at least 2-3 scientific articles highlighted in the same color on the graph, and is indicated by its name (bearing, in many ways, exclusively research-based). They are also joined by a number of separate "peripheral" clusters, represented in the graph by only one scientific publication (indicated in red). All the highlighted "sub-regions" of the graph are quite autonomous from each other, but at the same time they are closely related by citations within themselves. To isolate these clusters, the "Yufan Hu Proportional" layout was best suited, based on the connections of graph nodes to each other and the strength of these connections, with an initial step size of 20 units (see Fig. 2). The main advantage of the Yufan Hu algorithm is that it gives faster results compared to others by focusing on the attraction and repulsion of nodes located in the neighborhood (rather than making calculations for the entire network). This allows the researcher to process relatively large graphs and obtain better optimization of the distances between the outer and central nodes.

Fig. 2. Thematic clusters on the network graph

The results of the study and their discussion

The thematic identification of the selected parts of the graph allowed us to identify a fairly detailed "topography" of the subject area we are studying – the history of the Mari Territory and local Mari groups, as well as to identify the most popular research topics.

The central thematic group on the graph is, of course, the cluster "Medieval Mari Archeology", which includes 17 scientific publications. It is important to note that in the 2000s and 2010s, the source base for this set of scientific problems over the specified chronological period significantly expanded due to the discovery and study of a number of new burial grounds on the Vetluga and Volga rivers, such as the Kuzinsky Farms burial ground ^[15-16], Rusenikhinsky ^[17-18], Anatkasinsky burial ground ^[19] and etc. In particular, such aspects as the historical topography of the burial grounds of the Vetluzhsko–Vyatka interfluve at the turn of the I–II millennia ^[20], sacrificial complexes with clothing ^[21], costume of the medieval Mari population ^[22], analysis of fabrics ^[23], waist linings ^[24], metal bowls ^[25] and others were highlighted. archaeological finds ^[26-27], the reflection of the cult of ancestors in the funeral rite of burial grounds ^[28] and the specifics of burials with casting tools (female "casters") ^[29-31].

The second cluster "Archeology of Tsarevokokshaysk" (3 scientific publications) is thematically related to the previous one and is devoted to the historical, archaeological and anthropological analysis of the inventory of necropolises of the city of Tsarevokokshaysk of the XVII – early XX centuries. The researchers paid the greatest attention to such aspects as the features of the burials of the Newly baptized Mari people of the Entrance to the Jerusalem Necropolis ^[32], the funeral dishes of the Tikhvin necropolis as an element of the funeral culture and way of life of the population of Tsarevokokshaysk in the late XVIII – early XX centuries ^[33], as well as the problem of systematization of the crosses of the Tsarevokokshai necropolises ^[34].

One of the most dynamically developed research topics is also the history of forestry in the Mari Territory in the pre-revolutionary period. Eleven scientific publications on this topic are combined on a network model into a single cluster "Forestry of the Mari Territory". It is worth noting such studied problems as the development of peasant forestry in the Mari Territory in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries ^[35-36], the materials of forestry reports as a source for studying the history of forestry in the Mari Territory ^[37], the state of forestry in various counties of the Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod provinces: Vasilsursky ^[38], Cheboksary ^[39-41] and Tsarevokokshaysky ^[42], the use of the forest fund of the Mari Territory by state and specific departments ^[43], as well as other aspects of the development of forestry in the Mari Territory during this period ^[44-45].

Two clusters of publications on the network graph we have built are devoted to military topics in the history of the Mari Region. The first of them, which includes 6 scientific publications, is entitled "The Mari ASSR during the Great Patriotic War" and covers a number of issues related to the contribution of the Mari ASSR to the common cause of victory over the enemy during the Great Patriotic War. In particular, the researchers paid attention to such aspects as the military and labor exploits of the population of the Mari Republic ^[46], the evacuation of the population to the Mari ASSR ^[47], military defense construction in the territory of the Mari Territory ^[48-49], the harvesting of agricultural products ^[50], as well as the problem of waste and theft in the consumer cooperation system of the Republic and measures to combat them ^[51].

The second cluster of publications, "The Mari Territory during the First World War," is dedicated to the history of the Mari Territory during the First World War and includes 4 scientific publications. The articles are devoted to the reconstruction of the life of the city of Tsarevokokshaysk in 1914-1918 on the basis of preserved materials in the funds of the State Archive of the Republic of Mari El ^[52] and the Museum of the History of Yoshkar–Ola ^[53], as well as the problem of the stay of prisoners of war of the Austro–Hungarian Empire in the county towns of Kazan province – Tsarevokokshaysk and Kozmodemyansk ^[54-55].

The topic of the history of science and higher education, which is currently being actively developed in Russian historiography, is also reflected at the regional level. Based on the network model we have built, two clusters of publications are devoted to it, which are divided chronologically into the pre-revolutionary and Soviet periods. The first of them, entitled "Higher Education" and includes 6 scientific publications, is mainly devoted to the history of higher education in the MAO/MASSR in the 1930s. In particular, these articles pay attention to the period of formation of the first university of the Mari Republic – the Mari State Pedagogical Institute named after N.K.Krupskaya (opened in 1931) ^[56-57], the activities of its first head – A.I.Bolshukhin ^[58], as well as the peculiarities of admission of applicants in the 1930s ^[59]. The work of N.P.Ventsenostsev ^[60] and M.I.Romanov ^[61], who led the institute in 1943-1946 and 1959-1973, respectively, is also reviewed in separate articles.

The history of the education system in the Mari Region in the pre-revolutionary period has also received coverage in modern scientific literature. In the column, publications on this topic are grouped into a cluster "Primary Education", which includes 2 articles. They are devoted to such issues as the creation and development of a network of zemstvo schools in the Mari Territory at the beginning of the 20th century ^[62], as well as the problems of the development of women's education in secular schools in the Mari Territory in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries ^[63].

One of the popular research topics in this subject area is also the problem of studying Mari history by foreign scientists in the pre-revolutionary period. These 4 publications are grouped in the "Descriptions of foreigners" cluster. These works cover a number of separate scientific problems, which can be grouped chronologically into two groups. The first group is devoted to the analysis of sources from the 17th century, namely the depiction of Udmurts and Mari women in Augustin Meyerberg's album (embassy of the Austrian Emperor Leopold I in 1661-1663) ^[64], and the description of Mari people in Adam Olearius' "Description of the Journey" (Holstein embassy in 1633, 1636 and 1639) ^[65]. The second group of publications belongs to a later stage in the ethnographic study of the Mari people – the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. In particular, the researchers studied the role of Florentine botanist Stefan Sommier in the anthropological study of the Mari people ^[66], as well as the diary entries of Finnish ethnographer Julia Wichmann, compiled during a comprehensive expedition to the Mari Region in 1905-1906 ^[67].

Another cluster, entitled "Mari Local History", is also devoted to the problem of studying the material and spiritual culture and history of the Mari people, but already in the post-revolutionary period. There are 2 scientific publications devoted to this topic, which focused on the history of the local history movement in the Mari Autonomous Region in the pre-war period ^[68], as well as the contribution of the Mari Society of Local History (1926-1937) and its active figures to the study of various problems in the history and ethnography of the Mari people ^[69].

The next story from the history of the Mari Territory, which includes 2 scientific publications (the cluster "Education of MAO") and has received coverage in the latest Russian historiography, is the formation of the Mari Autonomous Region, which occurred according to a decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR on November 4, 1920 ^[70]. Another important aspect of the early years of the Mari Autonomous Region, which researchers have addressed, is the formation and development of printing in the Mari Region in the 1920s ^[71].

The next cluster of publications "CHX" (also 2 scientific publications) is devoted to separate subjects from the social and economic history of the USSR in the late 1950s and early 1960s, namely the problem of the creation and functioning of the Council of National Economy in the Mari ASSR in 1957-1963 ^[72-73].

One of the rather unique aspects of the history of the Mari ethnic group is the presence of an ethnographic group living outside the indigenous territory. We are talking about the eastern Mari people, whose local groups were formed as a result of the migration of the Mari population of the Middle Volga region to the territory of the Kama region and the Urals mainly from the second half of the XVI century to the middle of the XVIII century. A separate cluster "Eastern Mari", which includes 4 scientific publications, is devoted to the study of this local group of Mari people. Researchers have paid attention to such problems as the role of the religious factor in preserving the identity of the Eastern Mari people ^[74], the spread of Orthodoxy among the Mari people of the Permian Kama region in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries ^[75], the problem of acculturation in the multiethnic Eastern Trans–Amur region using the example of the wedding ceremony of the Eastern Mari people ^[76]. One of the articles is also devoted to the description of the main historical and ethnographic information about the Mari people of Udmurtia, belonging to the Kama group of Eastern Mari people ^[77].

The most important feature of the history of the Mari Region in the medieval period is a weak source base and a significant shortage, primarily of written sources. This gap, as shown above, is largely filled up by archaeological research, revealing many aspects of the existence of the Mari ethnic group, especially in the IX–XIII centuries. However, another area of interdisciplinary research is actively being developed, namely the study of the substratum toponymy of the Mari Region. Three scientific publications on this topic are combined by cross-citations based on the network model we have built into a single cluster "Ancient Marian Toponymy". In particular, based on toponymic material, they examined in detail the well-known hypothesis about the Western origin of the Mari people and their subsequent migration to the territory of modern settlement from the Kostroma Region and the Oka River basin ^[78]. Another important aspect of ancient Mari history, discussed in detail in two interrelated articles, is the analysis of the substrate (pre-Aryan and pre-Russian) toponymy of the area of the Emanaevskaya and Kocherginskaya archaeological cultures of the second half of the I – beginning of the II millennium AD (the basin of the middle reaches of the Vyatka River and the territory of the Republic of Mari El), undertaken to test the hypothesis of past settlement of these territories of the ancient Permian (ancient Udmurt) ethnos ^[79-80].

In conclusion of our historiographical review, it is worth paying attention to 6 "peripheral" publications that are not included in the above clusters. Their topics are also quite diverse and include a number of new research subjects.:

– the study of a mining peasant family in the late XVIII – first half of the XIX centuries on the example of Vasilsky district of Nizhny Novgorod province ^[81];

– issues of the formation and development of the agronomic service in the territory of the Mari Territory in the late XIX – early XX centuries ^[82];

– problems of liberalization of state religious policy at the beginning of the 20th century on the example of its implementation among the Mari population of Vyatka province ^[83];

– analysis of the famine of 1921-1922 in the Chuvash and Mari Territories from the point of view of the state of state–church relations in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s ^[84];

– consideration of the phenomenon of the activity of national universities in rural areas of the Mari ASSR in the 1960s and 1980s ^[85];

– analysis of the state and problems of continuity in the personnel policy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Mari ASSR in 1961-1991 in the context of well-known attitudes about the coming triumph of communism in the near future and the inevitable eradication of crime in Soviet society ^[86].

Conclusion

The conducted socio–network analysis of the latest Russian historiography devoted to various aspects of the past of the Mari Territory and local Mari groups allowed us to formulate a number of provisions that quite thoroughly characterize the state of this subject area at the present stage.

Firstly, in many ways, the "traditional" research topics that began to be developed back in the pre–revolutionary and Soviet periods, which include, for example, research on the archaeology of the Mari Territory in the Middle Ages, the history of forestry of the Mari Territory and the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic during the Great Patriotic War, received a new impetus in the 2010s. their development. It is associated both with a significant increase in the source base (primarily for archaeological work), and with the further improvement of methodological practices of specialists in regional history and the application of new research approaches and concepts.

Secondly, during this period, research on the history of the Mari Territory and local Mari groups also received a significant expansion in thematic terms. An analysis of the created collection of publications showed that in the second half of the 2010s, a wide range of new topics appeared in the Mari regional historiography in the spirit of modern historical science: historical anthropology, gender history, historical demography, historical sociology, microhistory, the history of everyday life, visual history, etc.

It is also important to note the large body of specialists (more than 270 scientists) engaged in research in the designated subject area. Of course, most of them are affiliated with various educational and scientific organizations of the Republic of Mari El: Mari State University, Vasiliev Mari Scientific Research Institute of Language, Literature and History, Volga State Technological University. At the same time, there are many researchers from other regions of Russia, mostly bordering the Mari Republic: Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Nizhny Novgorod region, Udmurtia, etc. Of course, this fact is largely related to the historical processes of settlement of local Mari groups from the zone of residence of the main ethnic community and the established tradition of their study by local specialists. And the presence of research interest from large scientific centers, primarily scientific institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, indicates increased attention to regional history, in our case, using the example of the Mari Territory and local Mari groups.

In general, it can be noted that the subject area of modern Russian historiography we have considered demonstrates a pronounced positive trend in its development, as evidenced by the significant thematic expansion of ongoing research, a large and geographically wide body of authors, the involvement of a number of new historical sources, the use of new research approaches, as well as significant grant support for research in this area. Also, in our opinion, an important indicator of the dynamic development of this scientific field is the presence in the selected collection of publications of more than fifty papers published in the journals of the RSCI core. This indicates the great scientific relevance of the research conducted on the history of the Mari Region and local Mari groups, and is also an important indicator of their recognition by the Russian and international academic community.

Thanks

The author expresses his deepest gratitude to the Mari Scientific Research Institute of Language, Literature and History named after V.M. Vasiliev (MARNIIYALI) and personally to Andrey V. Chemyshev, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory, and Galina Ilyinichna Baykova, head of the scientific library of the Institute, for their help and advice when working with bibliographic indexes of MARNIIYALI's scientific works, friendly attitude and high professional competence.