The Penetration of Digital Methods into Historical Scholarship: A Text-Mining Analysis of Russian Publications

The integration of digital technologies into historical research is a global trend; however, its manifestation varies across national academic traditions. This study investigates the explicit articulation and terminological adoption of digital methods in Russian historical science by analyzing the prevalence and dynamics of specific technological terms in a large corpus of publications. We first constructed a controlled thesaurus of 166 digital technologies by manually curating keyphrases from Russia’s primary specialized journal in the field (“Istoricheskaya Informatika”, Historical Informatics). This vocabulary was then used to perform text-mining on two distinct corpora: a broad sample of 95K Russian-language history articles from various journals (2004–2024) and a focused sample of publications on the Great Patriotic War History from the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI, 2014–2023). Our quantitative analysis reveals the frequency, trends, and thematic context of digital method mentions. The findings highlight a significant disparity between the specialized discourse of “Istoricheskaya Informatika” and the mainstream historical publications, while also identifying specific areas (such as archaeological studies) where certain technologies have gained traction. This research offers a novel, data-driven perspective on the “digital turn” in Russian historiography and contributes to the comparative study of digital humanities’ global development.