The report of the Director of St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences A.V. Sirenov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, at the Scientific Session “Humanities in the Age of Digitalization” of the General Meeting of the Department of Historical and Philological Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences on April 15, 2021
Alexey Vladimirovich spoke about the results of the first stage of the project “The history of the writing of the European civilization.” The project was based on the idea of Academician N.P. Likhachev about the possibility of studying the tradition and history of writing on the basis of a representative collection of genuine manuscripts in different languages, different peoples, and historical periods.
At the first stage, preparations were made for the digitization of documents, since successful digitalization requires not only special equipment but also the preliminary restoration of some manuscripts because some of them are simply impossible to unfold or scroll to scan with a non-contact scanner.
Alexey Vladimirovich also drew attention to the fact that during the implementation of the project, a specially developed Internet portal “History of Writing” will gradually be filled, which will allow researchers to work with digital copies of documents and use an extensive search database based on the described documents.
Several academic institutes of St. Petersburg are taking part in this project, which, as part of a consortium, became winners in the competition for a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science for 2020–2022. These are the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg Branch), the Institute of Russian Literature of the RAS (Pushkin House), and St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.