Sydorova, Maryna; Makhortykh, Mykola; Urman, Aleksandra (2023). Seen it all before: Instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory in Russian Twittersphere (Unpublished). In: MSA. Newcastle, UK. 3-7 July 2023.
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)The rise of social media platforms has substantial implications for individual and collective remembrance. The unprecedented connectivity of platforms allows their users to reflect on the past events and instrumentalise memories to interpret the recent developments. A number of studies (e.g. Trubina, 2010; Hoskins, 2017) argues that platform affordances can empower grassroots memory practices and challenge appropriation of the past; however, the same affordances can also be used to instrumentalise memories for facilitating public mobilisation and stigmatisation of the Other (Makhortykh & Aguilar, 2020).
In this paper, we examine the ambiguous relationship between online platforms and memories using the case of Holocaust remembrance in Russia. Despite being suppressed during the Soviet time (Dreyer, 2018), Holocaust memory currently is an important component of the WWII discourse in Russia (Rohdewald, 2008). Consequently, it is intensively appropriated both by supporters (e.g., to frame the political opponents as antisemites; Gaufman, 2015) and critics of the Kremlin (e.g., by presenting the authorities’ anti-COVID measures as a form of collective persecution). Such diversity prompts our interest towards how instumentalisation of Holocaust memory evolved within Russian Twittersphere over the years, in particular, following the outburst of COVID-19 and the new phase of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022.
For this aim, we retrieve historical data for the "holocaust" query in Russian from Twitter from 2012 to 2023. Because of the large volume of data, we rely on computational methods; specifically, we use a selection of topic modelling algorithms (e.g. LDA (Blei et al., 2003) and BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2020)), and then examine their performance using a set of qualitative and quantitative metrics. Then, we apply the best performing algorithm to process the complete dataset and examine how the use of Holocaust memory in Russian Twittersphere changed over time. By doing so, we aim to make a methodological contribution (i.e. by sharing our observations on the use of computational methods for studying the large volumes of history-related data) and an empirical one (i.e., by conducting the longitudinal analysis of instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory on Twitter).
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: |
Sydorova, Maryna, Makhortykh, Mykola, Urman, Aleksandra |
Subjects: |
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 900 History 900 History > 940 History of Europe |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Mykola Makhortykh |
Date Deposited: |
13 Nov 2023 07:47 |
Last Modified: |
13 Nov 2023 07:47 |
Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Twitter, Holocaust, instrumentalization, BERT, memory, Russia, topic modeling, computational |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/188822 |
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