The same but different? Constructing the history of the Holocaust on Wikipedia

Bastian, Mariella; Makhortykh, Mykola (12 September 2019). The same but different? Constructing the history of the Holocaust on Wikipedia (Unpublished). In: Digital Humanities Benelux 2019. Liege. September 11-13.

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In our paper, we discuss how digital humanities tools can be used to facilitate comparative
research on collaborative history-writing about historical trauma. The increasing use of digital media for remediating the past has attracted significant scholarly attention in the recent years (see, for instance, Garde-Hansen, Hosking and Reading (2009) and Hoskins (2016)). Yet, the long-term consequences of digitalization of historical events, in particular the highly traumatic ones, remain unclear. By enabling dynamic interactions in the transnational online environment, digital platforms can encourage the dialogue leading to the formation of more inclusive views on the past (Jones and Gibson, 2012). However, the same platforms often facilitate the distribution of historical hoaxes and conspiracy theories increasing societal polarization and supporting populist claims (Harambam, 2017).

An illustrative example of these complex interactions between collective remembrance of past
traumas and digital technologies is Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia. Built
upon the neutral point of view (NPOV) principle, which encourages fair and unbiased
representation of the encyclopedia’s subjects, Wikipedia offers a unique transnational space for
collective history-writing (Dounaevsky, 2013). Yet, the platform’s idealistic aspiration towards
representing the troubled past in a neutral way is often undermined by disagreements between
its authors. Consequently, instead of serving as a cross-cultural forum for negotiating the past
traumas, Wikipedia often turns into a memory battlefield used by individual actors for
promoting their preferred historical narratives (Rogers and Sendijarevic, 2012).

To achieve better understanding how internet users interact with historical traumas through
collaborative history-writing, we look how the Holocaust memory is constructed and negotiated
on Wikipedia. So far, only a few studies (Pfanzelter 2015; Wolniewicz-Slomka, 2016) discuss the
role of Wikipedia in the context of the Holocaust remembrance; yet, all of them focus on the
platform's use for representing separate episodes of the Holocaust. By contrast, we look on the
broader context of the Holocaust memorialization and ask if collaborative history-writing on
Wikipedia can encourage the transnational dialogue about the traumatic past or, instead,
create additional obstacles for it by promoting hoaxes and igniting hate. Specifically, we analyze to what degree the differences in historical paradigms between Eastern and Western Europe are projected on Wikipedia and how the collaborative history-writing about the Holocaust is influenced by the amalgamation of cultural practices, individual agendas and platform policies.

We implemented our analysis in two stages: first, we used a web crawler to retrieve articles
about the Holocaust on Wikipedia and map of semantic relations between these articles in
Eastern (i.e. Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and Belorussian) and Western European (i.e. English,
German, and Dutch) versions of the encyclopedia. Then, we employed social network analysis
to compare how these relations vary between different Wikipedia versions: specifically, we
examined how specific episodes of the Holocaust are integrated into the larger WWII narratives
and which of these episodes are more exposed or marginalized. Our findings indicated a
number of distinctions between specific language versions in relation both to the
presence/absence of specific episodes and the centrality of these episodes.

Secondly, based on the mapping, we identified articles which were central for the semantic
structures of the Holocaust representation in specific language versions. We then explored
these articles using qualitative content analysis. Specifically, we looked on their discussion
pages to examine how Wikipedia authors collaboratively construct the Holocaust history and
solve disagreements about the interpretations of its specific episodes. While doing so, we
analyzed how Wikipedia authors employed different discursive strategies (Kriplean et al., 2007;
Makhortykh, 2018) to legitimize their stance on the specific episodes of the Holocaust;
examples of such strategies varied from references to prior consensus to threats of sanctions
against ideological opponents. Our analysis indicated the presence of distinct approaches to
negotiating the traumatic past between specific language versions which can be attributed to
the cultural differences in the ways Wikipedia practices and norms are interpreted and
instrumentalized by individual authors.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Communication and Media Studies (ICMB)
UniBE Contributor:	Makhortykh, Mykola
Subjects:	300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 000 Computer science, knowledge & systems > 030 Encyclopedias & books of facts 900 History > 940 History of Europe
Language:	English
Submitter:	Mykola Makhortykh
Date Deposited:	17 Sep 2019 15:12
Last Modified:	02 Feb 2024 11:37
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Holocaust, Wikipedia, digital memory, digital humanities, network analysis
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/133247