HISTORICAL TEMPORALITIES IN THE WORLD OF “IMPENETRABLE HORIZONS”: SCIENTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF MODERN GLOBAL HUMANITIES

Abstract

The rise of digital technologies opens up new opportunities for historiographic research on thematic trends, which are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary in scope. By now, a clear publication trend has emerged in leading English-language journals, focusing on reflections on the specificities of contemporary perception and the uniqueness of experiences of historical events, their reflections in collective memory. This article is devoted to the scientometric construction of scientific discourse on "historical temporalities" using automated analysis technologies of unstructured big data. The Scopus database of scientific publications was used as a data source, accessed via API. The text collection consisted of 964 articles published between 1995 and 2023 and indexed by Scopus in the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences fields. Data analysis enabled the visualization of the geography of major centers of publication activity and the identification of researchers making significant contributions to understanding this issue. The authors identified the key concepts of the theoretical discourse on historical temporalities. Findings indicate that contemporary humanities reflection on historical temporalities encompasses discussions about differences in time perception, problems of periodization, the simultaneous existence of multiple temporalities that disrupt the linearity of past perception, and the value of unique and culturally conditioned local experiences of temporal experience. The diversity of aspects of temporal representations can be reduced to the common ideological foundation of the vast majority of studies – the recognition of the present's loss of linear predictability inherited from the modern era in the dynamics of historical processes.