ИСТИНА

Development of the new advanced digital technologies in the last decade created new possibilities for making more advanced infrastructure for historical research. This paper contains analysis of the new trends of this process at Moscow university. The last decade was marked by digitization of huge arrays of historical sources and artifacts taken from libraries, museums, archives, archaeological collections, etc. As a result historical sources being digitized became more available for historians. In the same time this process generated demand for analytical methods and computerized tools oriented to deal with digital historical data. This demand isn’t satisfied still. However a number of specialized digital tools and source-oriented software programs are applied now in the large-scale research projects. We can indicate two types of such projects: the first one is aimed to digitization and preservation of historical cultural heritage, and the second one has more analytical aims. In our projectswe use now GIS technology, 3D models, computerized text analysis software, advanced statistical programs, computerized modeling and simulation of historical processes, advanced WWW services. These tools become more sophisticated; available digitized historical data become more extended and diversified so the problem of verification of the research results becomes more complicated. In this paper we discuss this problem on the basis of research project conducted at the Department for Historical Information Science of Lomonosov Moscow State University; the project is related to the virtual reconstruction of old Russian monasteries ruined in the 20th century. It is based on 3D modeling technology and GIS. The project gives an example of transition from digitization and visualization to analytics in virtual reconstruction of historical and cultural heritage. The focus is given to methodology of using different types of historical sources in their combination to provide high quality professional virtual reconstruction of historical and cultural heritage. It should be noted that virtual reconstruction is now actively developing component of urban history which adds spatial and three-dimensional representations of historical parts of cities to traditional social urban history. The principal problem which should be resolved in such project concerns possibility to verify the results of virtual reconstruction on the basis of a set of historical sources collected to construct 3D models of cultural heritage objects under study. We propose software module to resolve this problem. To conduct such research project we need multi-professional team. Our team included 11 scholars, among them: historians, IT-specialists, architect, specialist in urban studies, restorers, culturologist, art historian.