About the past, but at different times: Computer analysis of texts in textbooks on the history of the USSR/Russia for six generations of students

In this article, we focus on the analysis of the texts of three history textbooks for university students published at different times: in 1946, 1983, 2001, 2006 and 2010. As a material, we use texts in each of the textbooks describing seven historical topics since the beginnings of the Principality of Kiev till the Reforms of Peter I. In our research, we tried to move away from the tradition banalized in discursive research to analyze history textbooks as a kind of ideologically labeled discourse. Instead, we consider the analyzed texts as a form of manifestation of a certain generational narrative. The authors of the textbooks, being not only institutional narrators, but also representatives of their generation, color the historiographical canvas, which remains, in principle, unchanged, with a certain emotional tone, and, when telling about the same events, shift the focus of thematic attention based on the spirit of their time. To solve this problem, we use computational linguistics methods: sentiment analysis, clusterization and topic modeling. Their use in combination with interpretive analysis allowed us to draw a number of conclusions: (1) there are historical subjects that are told, in general, within the same dominant tonality, while for others there is an ambivalence of evaluation; (2) the ranges even within the same tonality may vary greatly from textbook to textbook; for example, this is characteristic of texts about Ivan the Terrible; (3) each textbook is characterized by its own “tonal range”: 1946 is the most restrained, while 1983, 2001 and 2006 are the most altitudinal; (4) even in the textbooks of the same author team, published 9 years apart, the tonality of the texts of the same sections is not identical: from 1997 to 2006 it becomes, on the whole, noticeably more positive; (5) within the generational narrative, historical stories are revealed through the prism of a certain dominant idea - it is different for each time: for the post-war narrative it is the idea of protecting the state and paying attention to its geopolitical neighbours; for the post-perestroika period of the formation of the “young” Russian democracy (2001) -the idea of paysan community and veche as the forms of original democracy “of the people”; for the time of the formation of the modern Russian vertical of power (2010) it is the idea of centralization of power and its stability. This article uses the results of the Text as Big Data: Methods and Models for Working with Large Text Data project carried out within the framework of the Fundamental Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in 2024. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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