ILCEA Revue de l’Institut des langues et cultures d'Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie 39 | 2020 Les humanités numériques dans une perspective internationale : opportunités, défis, outils et méthodes XML-based Analysis of Early 20th-Century Russian State Duma Verbatims Analyse des verbatims de la Douma d’État russe du début du XXe siècle grâce au XML Анализ стенографических отчетов Государственной Думы Российской Империи начала XX века на основе XML Nadezhda Povroznik Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ilcea/9338 DOI: 10.4000/ilcea.9338 ISSN: 2101-0609 Publisher UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes Printed version ISBN: 978-2-37747-174-4 ISSN: 1639-6073 Electronic reference Nadezhda Povroznik, « XML-based Analysis of Early 20th-Century Russian State Duma Verbatims », ILCEA [Online], 39 | 2020, Online since 03 March 2020, connection on 10 October 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/ilcea/9338 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ilcea.9338 This text was automatically generated on 10 October 2020. © ILCEA XML-based Analysis of Early 20th-Century Russian State Duma Verbatims 1 XML-based Analysis of Early 20th- Century Russian State Duma Verbatims Analyse des verbatims de la Douma d’État russe du début du XXe siècle grâce au XML Анализ стенографических отчетов Государственной Думы Российской Империи начала XX века на основе XML Nadezhda Povroznik 1. Introduction 1 The State Duma of the Russian Empire was established in Russia in 1905 and became an important step from Late Imperial autocracy to constitutional monarchy. Conceptually, the State Duma has become a new authority body, which is evaluated as a specific type of parliament, different from the Western European parliaments (Hermann, 2016). Initially, according to the manifesto of Emperor Nicholas II from August 6, 1905 this body had only consultative functions. However, numerous protests contributed to the publication by the Emperor on October 17, 1905 of a new manifesto, which proclaimed the legislative powers of the Duma that “no law could take power without the approval of the State Duma”. The history of the State Duma at the beginning of the twentieth century is short because since 1906 there were four Dumas (with a different number of sessions during them), and on 6 (19) October 1917 the State Duma was dissolved by the Provisional Government. The historical significance of the establishment of the parliament in Russia was that the power of the monarch was limited. From this moment, laws in prerevolutionary Russia could come into effect only with the consent of the State Duma. 2 The introduction of the State Duma directly affected the change in the foundations of the formation of the political elite, of which deputies became a part. Since the ILCEA, 39 | 2020 XML-based Analysis of Early 20th-Century Russian State Duma Verbatims 2 composition of the State Duma was formed on the basis of elections, it was not only the status of a deputy, belonging to a particular estate (such as the nobility) or nationality that were extremely significant in the previous system, which gave the candidate an advantage in recruiting to the political elite. In the electoral system, the activity of the deputies and their personal qualities contributed to increasing the confidence of voters and assumed great importance. Some deputies were repeatedly elected to the State Duma, and this demonstrated a high degree of confidence of voters. Therefore, re- elected deputies are of particular interest because, having a repeated electoral status, they are representatives of the sub-elite (Kiryanov et al., 2017). The question arises about the significant factors that influenced the re-election of deputies, including the dependence of re-election on the complex of socio-cultural characteristics of deputies (age, nationality, estate, etc.) and their activities in the Duma. Obviously, the answers to these questions can be given only on the basis of the search and organization of data, as well as their processing based on information technology. 3 This study is part of the project “Formation of the Parliamentary Sub-Elite in Late Imperial Russia”1 and is intended to organize a source base for the effective analysis of the deputies. The sociocultural characteristics of deputies were established and organized into a database at the previous stage of studying the composition of the State Duma at the beginning of the 20th century, and at this stage it was necessary to identify and analyze a set of characteristics of the activities of deputies and determine their completeness. 4 The verbatim records of State Duma meetings are one of the most important sources for studying the deputies’ activities in the State Duma. These detailed multivolume official publications contain transcripts of meetings, that is, verbatim records of the speeches of deputies and those participating in Duma meetings. The transcripts also designated some non-verbal reactions of deputies, for example, applause, whistling, etc. In order to work with the transcripts and the necessary navigation through them, simultaneously with the publication of the texts of verbatim reports, personal and subject indexes were also published. The significant relationship of personal alphabetic indexes to the verbatim reports is that their content in the most structured form reflects the activities of each deputy in the Duma, which makes it possible to evaluate the activity of parliamentarians in quantitative and qualitative terms. Indexes have a clear structure in their design, which enables the use of computer methods in their study. Computer processing of a structured source allows us to reveal the hidden information that is difficult to detect by non-computerized means. 5 Personal alphabetic indexes of each Duma are a list of data on deputies and contain formalized information about each elected deputy, including structured information about their activities during each session of the particular Duma2. Information on the activities of the deputy is structured according to the sets of identified types of activities (see Figure 1). ILCEA, 39 | 2020 XML-based Analysis of Early 20th-Century Russian State Duma Verbatims 3 Figure 1 – Fragment of a personal index (Szeftel, 1976). 6 The markup of texts allows for the analyzing of the activities of deputies, comparing their activities during several re-elections to the Duma. Besides, analysis of the structure of indexes and their changes allows us to identify opportunities for further study of these sources, assess their information potential, explore the degree of detail of the description of activity characteristics of deputies, as well as changes in the structure of the data presented. 7 At the same time, a deep immersion in the structure of indexes is necessary for a more detailed source criticism, to see the distortions in the formation of sources, which can be corrected later by searching and supplementing information from the meeting stenograms and other sources. 8 The purpose of this article is to study personal alphabetic indexes and the dynamics of changes in their structure using the methods of “deep” text markup based on XML- markup language, as well as to determine the information potential of the source for further use in studying the history of the Russian parliament of the early 20th century. 2. Historiography 9 Historiography of the Russian State Duma at the beginning of the 20th century is extensive. The development of the political system (Szeftel, 1976), external and internal events (Schaeffer Conroy, 1998), changes in relations with the Emperor (Kulikov, 2012) and the State Council and many other factors influenced the development of the Duma (Hosking, 1973), which the researchers paid attention to. The study of the State Duma began by contemporaries in pre-revolutionary times, continued after the completion of its activities in 1917, and in the post-Soviet period due to the change in the ideological course of modern Russia the study of the pre-revolutionary Duma received a further ILCEA, 39 | 2020 XML-based Analysis of Early 20th-Century Russian State Duma Verbatims 4 impetus. However, at present most of the works are devoted to specific issues of parliamentary history, and only a small number of generalizing works. There is no comprehensive study of the historiography of the history of the State Duma of Tsarist Russia (Mogilevskiy et al., 2007), although there are historiographic works of separate Dumas (Thatcher, 2011) and individual areas of historiography (Kiryanov, 2013). 10 The activities of the State Duma are associated by researchers with the processes of the formation of the political elite in the Russian Empire, which is understood as a much more complex process than just the formation of bureaucracy (Gaman-Golutvina, 1998). Therefore, it is so important to pay attention to the deputy corps, deputy fractions and the activities of individual deputies. The study of the deputies and individual trajectories of deputies were considered by historians from different perspectives. Walsh W. B. (1950), Emmons T. (1983), Ivanov A. A. (2013) publications are dedicated to the participation of political parties in elections and their work in the Duma. Kozbanenko V. A. (1996), Demin V. A. (1996), Kiryanov I. K., Lukyanov M. N. (1995) analysed in detail the formation and interaction of the Duma fractions . One of the first prosopographic studies was the project “Duma I”, performed by L. I. Borodkin, Yu. G. Grigorieva, N. B. Selunskaya and others (1996). The aim of their project was to conduct a prosopographical study of deputies of the first State Duma. Based on the design, filling and analysis of the data of the information system, the authors studied a collective portrait of parliamentarians at the beginning of the 20th century. The study of the elites and sub-elites, which is considered in the works of Korros A. (2002), Arkhipov I. L. (2000), is relevant for understanding the development of the political system. At the same time, the analysis of sub-elites requires additional attention.