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)

Abstract

The article analyzes the experience gained by the author in the course of working with three online databases of visual historical sources in the context of studying the transformation of the Southern Coast of Crimea in the late XIX - early XX centuries. They are: the electronic State Catalog of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation, as well as two crowdsourcing platforms - Pastview and Retromap.ru . The author examines the origin, format, structure of these aggregators of visual historical sources, the information potential of the content, advantages and disadvantages of usage, examples of how visual information found using these databases contributed to solving specific historical and source problems. Different aspects of working with online databases of visual sources are considered in the context of historiographical discussions about the "digital turn" in humanitarian knowledge, the "visual turn" in the structure of the source base of historical research, disputes about the multimodality of the content of historical knowledge. It is suggested that soon online databases of visual sources will become as familiar an information search tool for a historian as electronic catalogues of libraries and archives. The emphasis is placed on the methodology of a systematic approach, methods of complex source studies that allow reconstructing historical reality by analyzing and comparing information extracted from sources of different types (written, pictorial and material) and types.