Infosphere and the Study of Religious Education in the Russian Empire

Abstract

For humanitarians, the latest century was a period of active search for new methodological approaches. New informational technologies have expanded the capabilities of the human body; they have become “prostheses” expanding the perspectives of scholarly research. And it applies not only to data processing methods, but to the search for necessary research information as well. Thanks to digitized archives and research publications, which are located in virtual libraries, knowledge is coming into the infosphere. The concept of “infosphere”, that complemented a series of other “spheres”, such as “bibliosphere”, “noosphere”, etc, was introduced into the modern research vocabulary by Luciano Floridi. In the 1990-s, he stated that the emergence of new information systems means the onset of “the fourth revolution” and shaping the infosphere. But, in fact, the infosphere and the “virtual world” existed earlier; they appeared along with book collections. In this sense, we may talk about the infosphere in the context of the nineteenth century and even earlier epochs. The article sets issues of the reconstruction of the infosphere of the Orthodox educational institutions of the Russian Empire. The sources for such research include descriptions of book collections of seminaries and theological academies, the periodicals of those educational institutions, memories of teachers and students, and so on. The basis for the study of the infosphere of the Orthodox educational institutions is built on the numerous research works on the process of teaching in theological educational institutions, and on the history of their book collections. It is acceptable to talk about the infosphere of the Orthodox educational institutions of the Russian Empire in relation to virtual collections that are actively created in the Internet.