Research:The Politics of Memory
This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.
The project “Politics of Memory” leverages edit histories of Wikipedia articles on historical figures, places, and events to study how, when and why collective memory changes over time.
Collective memories - groups' shared representations of the past (Halbwachs 1992) - are both powerful and malleable. They are malleable because they are not exclusively based on historical "facts". And they are powerful because controlling the memory of the past means power to define what was, is, and should be. Vying for this power, many different actors (“memory entrepreneurs”) including political actors, artists, and academics act to preserve or challenge pervasive narratives. Such actions range from statements by politicians about how the past should be remembered, to governments introducing memory laws, activists removing statues, or academics writing books: How do such actions shape collective memories?
To answer this question, the first step is to find a way to systematically track changes in collective memories. Our approach uses Wikipedia articles’ edit histories to do so. By analysing how Wikipedia articles on historical figures, places, and events change over time, we aim to answer the following research questions:
1. How does collective memory change over time?
2. How do memory entrepreneurs shape collective memory?
3. What is the best (reliable, valid, efficient) way to measure collective memory with Wikipedia data?
Framework and empirical strategy
editWe build on a conceptualisation of collective memory as shared narratives about the past and follow Wertsch (2008) which distinguishes between specific narratives that evolve around events, and underlying schematic narrative templates – “generalized structures used to generate multiple specific narratives with the same basic plot” (p. 140). We operationalize the schematic narrative templates as context-specific group-role associations and leverage recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) to model these associations from (changes in) Wikipedia articles on historic figures, places, and events. We focus on two case studies:
- Activism and the British Empire
- Nativist populism and WWII in Poland and Germany
Timeline
editActive research period: November 2023 – May 2027
Planned Output
editAmong other outputs, we are planning to write three research articles. One article will introduce and test the framework and approach, two articles will be on the case studies. Furthermore, we will make our datasets and the research blueprint available.
Funding
editThe project is supported by an ESRC New Investigator Grant (Project Reference ES/X007332/1).
References
editHalbwachs, Maurice, and Lewis A. Coser. 1992. On Collective Memory. Nachdr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wertsch, James V. 2008. ‘Collective Memory and Narrative Templates’. Social Research: An International Quarterly 75(1): 133–56. doi:10.1353/sor.2008.0051.