Remembrance of the Past in a Digital Environment: Cognitive Landmarks for Historical Research

Abstract

Russian professional historians have long been working with “memory” in their disciplinary field. They study collective and personal memory of the past in a variety of forms of memories, evidences of experiencing the past, their documentation and storage. In the last third of the 20th — beginning of the 21th century, their research activities are increasingly influenced by the cognitive turns that take place in social sciences and humanities. At present, the object of increased attention of Russian historians is the qualitative and technological changes occurring in the methods and forms of the production of memory of the past, its storage, transmission, appropriation and consumption in the information society. The article examines the possibilities of updating theoretical and methodological tools in historical studies of memory based on innovations occurring in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies and, above all, in such intensively developing areas as media memory studies and digital memory studies. The key concepts of media memory, digital memory, algorithmic memory, and socio-technical connected memory introduced into the scholar circulation of memory studies can serve as important cognitive guidelines for historians to study the peculiarities of constructing memory of the past in a modern mediatized digital society, the specifics of its documentation, formats for saving, and transferring. The article discusses the scope of these concepts and their heuristic potential for identifying and investigating new properties of collective memory produced in a mediatized digital environment. The inclusion of such concepts in the arsenal of historical studies of memory as units of analysis opens up opportunities for complicating scientific perception, categorization and conceptualization of the phenomena of memory of the past.