War Memories and Online Encyclopedias
Framing 30 June 1941 in Wikipedia
in Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
Author:
Mykola Makhortykh
Mykola Makhortykh
Mykola Makhortykh is a doctoral candidate in the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam. makhortykhn@yahoo.com
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Abstract
This article examines how digital media interact with collective memories and teaching practices by exploring a selection of Wikipedia articles that describe the capture of Lviv by the Germans on 30 June 1941. This event constitutes an important episode in the history of Ukraine and a complex case of violence that produced several controversies concerning the national historiographies of the Second World War in the post-Soviet region. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics, this article investigates how the event is represented in different language versions of Wikipedia and assesses what kind of memory is produced by each of them.