No 2 (2022)

Digital platforms present revolutionary phenomena that fundamentally change the way both scientific research and its metadata are stored and organized. Platforms inherit features of classical libraries, at the same time seen as revolutionary, implementing algorithms and interactive methods of systematization and analytics. Adequate access to research data and metadata is perceived as the result of a high-quality storage organization. The latter is aimed to provide an adequate picture of research fields’ conditions and interactions, as well as the prospects of their development. While data is related to researches themselves, metadata demonstrate social aspects of scientific work: researches, institutions and projects they conduct. The lack of a universal workflow of entering data leads to multiple misrepresentations, among others, about the platforms themselves. Understanding of platforms as autonomous structures, “black boxes” with “mysterious” algorithms, significantly limits intellectual access to issues required to be resolved in relation to them. The workflow of entering and processing data and metadata is dependent on the competences of the actors, mentioned above. Should a scientist, focused on actual research, be well equipped technically to avoid misrepresentation of scientific results on their part? Should a data scientist be universally educated so they can comply with the standards of historical indexers? Indexing itself is one of the main focuses of the article. It is analyzed in two respects: as an instrument of textual search (on the example of early medieval practices) and as an instrument of navigation in multiple fields of research on a platform. The index is construed here in accordance with its initial function of a pointer, on the one hand, and as a “map-reading”, which not only reads, but also creates the maps of communications in disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, on the other. This observation highlights the necessity to overcome a number of difficulties. The first one is correspondence between the conceptual and technical levels of the platform organization. Another issue is the way classical methods optimize and visualize data within the realm of digital storage. Indexing, science mapping and complex systems engaged cannot be unambiguously evaluated. They all are methods used to simultaneously optimize and politicize data (as it is demonstrated in the “politics of the list”). The given analysis shows the need for constant work on the correspondence of the conceptual, visual and technical levels of academic platforms: technical issues could not be perceived independently from the conceptual ones, whether they are related to the data or metadata of research. The progress of knowledge and communication of scientific communities demonstrate themselves as dependent on the strategies related to the methodological apparatus that determines the quality of research data and metadata representation.

The collection Poems (1916) by Prince Vladimir Paley does not have a common plot and composition, it presents scattered lyrical impressions. The composition of the collection is organized by extra-textual pictorial elements: headpieces and vignettes. Responding to the collector’s taste of the poet, these elements force one to read his lyrics differently: not as a transfer of personal impressions, but as a complex construction of his own identity based on various cultural languages. The use of the iconological method and appeal to the resources of visual semiotics allow showing how, thanks to the order of illustrations, certain motifs of romantic and modernist poetry cease to be self-sufficient, becoming only moments in the acquisition of a more holistic lyrical position. Such design elements of the book as cartouches with the titles of poems, headpieces with images of landscape and genre scenes, and scattered vignettes were analyzed; the entire volume of the book’s illustrative accompaniment was covered. The article shows that despite the fact that the design of this book is fundamentally restrained, which corresponded to the new settings of the taste of wartime, each type of artistic accompaniment builds its own program for reading these poems, not allowing the content of individual poems to be reduced to the reproduction of romantic, neo-romantic or symbolist motifs. The article demonstrates how cartouches with the titles of the poems allowed educated readers to thematize the relationship between nature and history by de-automating the perception of the title as an indication only of a subject topic. The decor of these elements indicates both the interpenetration of the natural world and the world of culture, and the inadequacy of individual languages or semiotic formations to convey the idea of a person’s metaphysical destiny. Three poems with the cartouches build an independent plot of the presence in nature of not only fatal forces, but also metaphysical insights. Illustrations-headpieces demanded a special interpretation based on knowledge of the realities and conceptual meanings of certain painting genres. The article proves that poems with the headpieces convey the general plot of the independence of an intimate mental life from ready-made patterns of history perception. In these poems, the idea dominates of intimizing history as the only way to comprehend the meaning of historical catastrophes. Finally, individual vignettes allow reading the entire array of the poems in this book as supporting the main idea of accepting natural necessity in order to overcome private ideas about fate, with the necessary Christian reinterpretation of forebodings and individual symbolic indications. Thus, the illustrative mode of the book corresponds to the principles of multilingualism and polystylistics of Russian modern style. The study allows clarifying both the landmarks of the official Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period and the specificity of the poetic works of Vladimir Paley as one of the most striking cases of supporting the original poetics with the visual semiotics of natural and cultural objects.

Philosophers of postmodernism consider language to be not a passive mediator between reality and consciousness but a prism, through which people interpret the reality: J. Baudrillard said that mass media demonstrate people signs instead of reality. It is similar to the role that advertisements and commercials play. Ads and commercials reveal and, moreover, help create intentions and desires of society, and have a close relationship with it, being a kind of a guide for the recipient. It seems to be an issue of high importance to investigate the usage of precedent-related phenomena in Japanese advertisements and commercials to distinct how Japanese society represents, evaluates, and reflects itself, what images the society and the recipient can create through them. Precedent-related phenomena are verbal and non-verbal elements which are repeated in the discourse of a linguacultural community. There are several types of precedent-related phenomena such as precedent-related text, name, phrase, and situation. Being important in emotional and cognitive ways, precedent-related phenomena are often used in connotative meanings in order to reveal cultural values and associations within the recepient: precedent-related phenomena help express values and cultural concepts of a group or society. They make possible to estimate the product or to manifest one’s position on a global scale by comparing or contrasting a real situation with a precedent-related one. Therefore, precedent-related phenomena impact the recipient with all their linguacultural information, and imply additional characteristics. Precedent-related phenomena are used not only in oral or written speech, literature, but also in advertisements and commercials, which borrow all the above-mentioned features. Thus, such phenomena help imply positive meanings to the object of ads, draw attention to it, imply characterization, become a source of argumentation through emotional cognition, entertain the recipient and bring them aesthetic pleasure when a well-known precedent-related phenomenon becomes, for example, a part of a pun or a core part of narrative advertising. Precedent-related phenomena are frequently used in headings or slogans to catch the recipient’s attention or set the tone of an advertisement, to create a more complicated image of a product via associations. The analysis shows that, among all precedent-related phenomena in advertisements and commercials, names are used more frequently. Perhaps this is due to the necessity to introduce the protagonist, who will express the product’s advantages, into the conception. A precedent-related name can also build direct or indirect arguments. Recipients follow the advertisement’s plot, where familiar precedent-related names appear, and its twists and turns help hide the intentions of utilitarianism marketing. Precedent-related phenomena can also serve a function of a password: phenomena based on national culture dominate in Japanese advertisements and commercials. Among the different source-fields of the phenomena, the “History” field predominates, the “Fairy-Tales” comes second. This highlights Japanese society’s respectful and positive attitude to their history and culture. Ads and commercials create an image of a mono-national society, who understand and value their link to ancestors and their heritage, which all the Japanese are truly proud of.

The image is not an exact copy of a historical object. It represents its structural equivalent in one or another pictorial expression, which historians often do not notice or ignore. Therefore, in history, due to the lack of a proper research methodology, graphics are the visual support of the text that enhances the text’s perception and attractiveness. The aim of this publication is, based on the method of structural analysis of image elements, to show the depth of the informative potential of graphic works with, at first glance, “doubtful” reliability. The object of analysis is View of the Port of Odessa by Louis Garneray. This work is full of symbols, metaphors, allegories due to the fact that it was created on the basis of oral recollections of European sailors who once visited the port of Odessa. The analyzed work is a set of staffage and entourage elements that are of secondary importance in other work of arts. Seven plot elements were identified, which carry indexing and symbolic information about Odessa. Compositionally, these elements make up three parts: the foreground “Cape Fontan” (a lighthouse and a cape, walking people), the middle plan “Bay” (ships, Odessa Harbour), and the background “Mainland” (city, mountain range, bastions). For Europeans, Odessa was a typical, but important commercial, military and economic Mediterranean city. The main stereotypes about Odessa were its localization in the highlands and excessive fortifications. The actual Odessa markers were the Holy Transfiguration Cathedral, the lighthouse at Cape Fontan, as well as the multi-ethnicity of the population.