Digital Approaches for Studying Elected Representative Institutions in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

The research is purposed to classify the existing digital approaches for studying the history of local self-government and the history of parliamentarism in pre-revolutionary Russia, as well as to identify their possibilities and limitations. It is aimed to analyze digital projects and studies of the history of Russian and foreign elected representative institutions. The research approved the effectiveness of applying digital methods and tools to the study of representative institutions and highlighted the following two large groups of digital approaches: 1) digital editions of historical sources and their analysis and 2) prosopographical system and database. In addition, the article presents the results of the use of digital technologies to study deputies’ mobility from the Zemstvo to the State Duma, and to analyze the modernization potential of Zemstvo by means of the content analysis of the journals devoted to provincial Zemstvo assemblies.