Digital Technologies in the Study of Documents of Russian Governance of the Central Caucasus in 1763–1858: Problem Statement and Preliminary Results

The article is devoted to the research of the application features and summarizes the preliminary results of the use of digital technologies, in particular the method of content analysis of large text data, in the study of documents of the Russian administration of the Central Caucasus in 1763—1858. Information is provided on the theoretical basis of the content analysis method and the possibilities of its application in historical research are determined. For the research, a program was developed using the graphical user interface (GUI) in the cross-platform event-oriented graphical library Tkinter in the Python programming language. To conduct a content analysis, a selection of keywords reflecting the ethnicity of local residents, the names of administrative and judicial institutions, the features of the administrative and territorial structure and the names of settlements that were strategically important for the development of the region. The analysis of the tonality of texts using a sample of terms on a binary scale with positive and negative connotations is carried out. The content analysis data is visualized in the form of graphs. The obtained results were interpreted in relation to the historical conditions of their use to convert quantitative values into a qualitative representation of the phenomena under consideration. It is established that the content analysis and determination of the tonality of the texts of sources on the history of the peoples of the Central Caucasus in 1763—1858 makes it possible to establish the ratio of the frequency of use of certain terms with specific events and phenomena and to give a general assessment of the nature of the ongoing transformations and the attitude of government representatives and different categories of society to them.