Auxiliary Disciplines of History in the Age of Internet |
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3. Immediate Information and Primary Sources 3.1 News Portals Keeping of an archontological study up-to-date often required monitoring the news on appointments, dismissals, demises and other events occurring in about to hundred or more nations around the world. For many years, researchers relied on the yearbooks compiled by various publishers (Keesing's, Collier's Yearbook, annual supplements to the Britannica Encyclopædia and others), which reflected the changes in government structures. News monitoring through regular media outlets, such as newspapers and magazines, was also a method, but the new era came when researchers received an access to the Internet network. While it is not an object of this study, one should recognize the importance of tremendously increased stream of news information, which provides the scholars with a perfect opportunity not only to record appropriate facts, but also to check local sources in local languages as it may contain tiny details, which help reconstruct the whole range of events in chronology of changing executives. Some news channels were practically inaccessible to many researchers as the inauguration of an American president was normally covered by thousands of newspaper columnists and the installation of government in the Kingdom of Tonga may have passed practically unnoticed. The Internet has affected such imbalance and enabled the researchers to access more resources, both geographically and in terms of their specific interests. What is even more important from the viewpoint of archontology, the researchers may receive an access to the news as reported by official state authorities in formal parlance. Now the Internet helps to solve the issue of verifying dates, which is pertinent to archontology. A complexity in verifying the dates, which usually stems from accessing the sources of different kind and reliability, may be resolved by referring to the primary sources, which include, first of all, the government gazettes and parliamentary proceedings. Official web sites of heads of state, national governments, parliaments, ministries and other organizations, which may be subjects of research. 3.2 Official Information One of the starting points for searching the materials related to national chronologies is the official web sites maintained by the administrations of heads of state, governments, ministries, agencies, international organizations, political parties. In the past few years, web editors follow the tradition of adding biographical information on each important office holder, who enters his/her office, thus providing immediate opportunity for updating and extending the records of Archontological web sites. The use of monitoring software helps to trace the changes within the official web sites. Most changes became widely known and might be verified by applying to appropriate departments in national administrations and ministries. It creates another opportunity for obtaining additional information requested by researchers. Public Relations departments and officers responsible for disclosing the information of public interest work as a two-way channel with an advantage of consulting official documents and providing useful links. It has become quite usual to include wide sections on the histories of office or public institution with pictorial galleries of office holders and monarchs linked to biographical sketches. However, the materials presented in these sections are mostly simplified information for consumption by the general public and should be mostly avoided from citing as it often contains errors. It should be understood that the nature of web publishing is closely linked to current materials and contemporaries. Historical content is indispensable attribute of practically all official web sites, but it is intended to serve as PR material reflecting the views of current political regimes whatever nature it may have. Much worthier source is the official web sites maintained by political institutions, but using the content based on academic studies. A brilliant example of such source is the Brazilian "who was who" presented by the "Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação História Contemporânea do Brasil", sponsored by the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV). Using "Dicionário Histórico-Biográfico Brasileiro" ("Brazilian historical and biographical dictionary") as the main source for creating the web site content, it provides online access to dozens of biographies for Brazil ian politicians written by professionals and enhanced with images and facsimile copies of important documents. As an example of mostly unknown, but certainly valuable information for historians and chronologists may serve officially recognized facts of forging birth documents for a number of Brazilian presidents (Getúlio Vargas, João Goulart and others). While many authoritative encyclopedias and dictionaries on the history of Brazil still overlook these facts, the online version of "Dicionário" may help correct these errors. In many cases, the official web sites of governments and ministries have links to another important sources of official information the national gazettes, state bulletins and other representation of official viewpoint in chronological order and related documents including decrees, resolutions, regulations, announcements. Only a few libraries, such as the British Library, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (London), and the Library of Congress, may provide an opportunity for studying a variety of official newspapers. A study carried out by the members of the FLAG (Foreign Law Guide Project) project shows that only a few web sites provides access to the official newspapers, which may be a key source for archontological and chronological studies. While some holdings of the official documentation for selected nations in the libraries are marked as "incomplete" or "some parts missing", the online access is even more restricted and usually does not start before the mid-1990's. Even the nations having rich history of legislation cannot be recognized as most progressive in providing online access to their national legislative heritage. In case with the United Kingdom , The London Gazette, an official newspaper of England and UK since 1665, is accessible for some historical periods such as the war years (1914-1920, 1939-1948). The Annual Register (1758-1778), an important source for tracing the changes in the structure of the British government, is a part of the "Internet Library of Early Journals", a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds , Manchester and Oxford , conducted under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme. Summarizing the experience in working with online primary sources, one may conclude that collections of official information pertinent to building national chronologies and studying the history of offices are presented mostly as a) contemporary collections including the documentation useful for the purposes of executing and studying current legislation, and as b) projects restricted by time periods. We can hardly say that any attempts have been made at building online databases for historical legislation records covering the periods from the beginning of certain political entities to present days. 3.3 Legal Record Collections The real treasuries of the Web are the collections of legal documents related to the changes in governments, which usually exist either in original facsimile form (PDF, TIFF) or in the Hypertext format. A number of most important features of the electronic collections includes: Retrospective electronic publishing (started in mid-1990's; continuously growing) World-wide access Authenticity (PDF, TIFF) Internalization (English-language interface; translation utilities) Creation of collections of legal documents on the Web was aimed first of all at providing essential judicial information to those professionally interested in fast access to laws, regulations, codes and other products of national legislation. The publishers of these electronic documentation also realized that the process of making laws should be an integral part of such collections as it helps better understanding how the laws are made and what stages it goes through before taking legal effect. Thus, increasingly national parliaments attached proceedings sections to their web sites providing access to researchers and enabling them not only to browse thousand-page reports, but to organize effective search by keywords, phrases, dates and periods. When first created, the legal databases for a long time existed as semi-official source since electronic texts could not be easily used as a term of reference, but it steadily grew into collections of facsimile documents. One of the earliest efforts was a project headed by Dr. Maximilian Herberger (Institut für Rechtsinformatik, Universität des Saarlandes) aimed at converting the "Bundesgesetzblatt" (Federal Legal gazette) into electronic form and providing access to the searchable database including the gazette's issues from October 1990 to December 1997. The only solution for maintaining the authenticity of legal records would be producing electronic analogues of official gazettes in the same shape as its hard-copy originals. This goal of creating "virtually legal" documentation was basically achieved by introducing the Portable Document Format vigorously promoted by the Adobe Systems Inc. and incorporating the Adobe Acrobat Reader into operating systems of computers. Currently, scholars are able to enjoy studying legal statutes of national legislation and tiny details of legislation process relying not only on the collection of libraries, but instant access to primary sources. Archontology is one of the first disciplines, which benefited from tremendous changes in approach to handling legal information by extracting validated facts and dates from certified sources. Currently, the records of parliamentary hearings are presented mainly as follows: 1. All-time records of parliamentary proceedings for the selected nations:
2. Selections for time periods
3. Most recent (most European countries, USA , Canada and others) One could easily notice that despite its status of superpowers, many European and American nations are still on the way to providing on-line access to the history of their legislatures. Normally, the information is available for the records since mid-1990s, when first Internet web sited began to exist. Digitalization of earlier sources apparently requires additional financing. While the recent records might be useful for a wider range of interested people, the records of the pre-Internet era are normally wanted by those making a study in history and related disciplines. Additional factor, which may influence the development of retrospective web printing, is a cultural aspect. Preserving state history is seen by the governments as a source of national pride and a matter of national interests. However, due to occasional disruption between two antagonistic structures of political governance, such as in case of South Africa (pre-1994 apartheid state and modern republic) and Russia (USSR and modern Russian Federation), we could hardly expect that the records of some legislatures would ever be made available online in the nearest future. The progress in accumulating online sources for history and its auxiliary disciplines might be achieved through adding more materials to the web sites of major repositories of sources libraries and archives. However, currently we can hardly state that any considerable steps have been made. Libraries and archives used the advantage of creating online catalogues, but digitalization of collections of books is a rather slow process closely connected with copyright issues and costs for digitalization. The most interesting example of successful online library is the Gallica project bringing more than 70,000 works online. Illustrative examples and facts mentioned in this article proves growing potential of the Internet for extending the boundaries for many academic disciplines including auxiliary disciplines of history and political science. Archontology as a newly emerging discipline has certainly benefited from the availability of sources placed on the Internet, but what is more important it has claimed its place as an independent branch of historical science. This process will continue to influence the humanities and may become a subject of much wider research. Return to Part 1 . |
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