Historical Thematic Website “Simeiz. Guide to Old Dachas”: Stages of Development and Research Prospects

Abstract

The article summarizes preliminary results related to the development and operation of historical thematic website “Simeiz. Guide to Old Dachas”. The website was created by the author and his colleagues in 2019 as a part of a workshop at the Department of Source Studies of the Lomonosov Moscow State University History Faculty. The workshop aimed at studying the history of the southern coast of Crimea in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The stages and preliminary results of this work are considered in the context of current discussions about the “digital turn” in history. The author analyses the reasons for creating the historical website, its structure, development stages, specific features of its content, database creation and crowdsourcing.  It is stated that the website development was the first important step of the whole research project, its “driver”. Moreover, besides a new form of historical knowledge dissemination, the work on the site provided for setting new source and analytical tasks that is to increase the information impact of sources and get new opportunities for processing the electronic database. These results may be of interest to historians who run similar historical projects.