Book
Human and History in the Digital Age: A Multidimensional Approach
Editor: Sledzevski Igor
Reviewer: Leonid Borodkin, Vladislav Lektorskij, Yakovlev Alexander
Москва, 2023, 734 p.
This book is written in response to the increasingly apparent need for more integrative methods in the field of Oriental studies and to today’s rapidly evolving discourse on the nature of ‘objectivity’ in historical and, more broadly, humanitarian knowledge. The author proposes a new concept for scholarly research: a multidimensional system communications approach, a synthesis of spatial, digital (communicational and informational), anthropological, sociocultural and other epistemological ‘turns’ in history and other ‘cultural sciences’ in the digital age. The proposed transition from simplified linear or axial projections of the past to an N-dimensional representation would make it possible to obtain a more comprehensive and multifaceted (hence, more objective) view of historical events. This study focuses on fundamental social dimensions of history and culture. Societal, political, ethnic and religious factors together create the multidimensionality human beings, determining both individual and collective forms of identity. The approach introduced here offers scholars a correspondingly broad toolbox that includes methods for system-communications analysis, modeling communications systems, systems-logical verification, universal language equivalents and interactive participant observation.
This monograph is addressed to a wide range of specialists, graduate students and students of socio-humanitarian disciplines, primarily historians, orientalists, sociologists, culturologists, political scientists, ethnologists, scholars of religion, experts in related and applied areas of knowledge.