Research and Development: Applications

The project aims to answer the question of the significance and consequences of the functioning of historical narratives in the Web 2.0 space. The narratives will be considered as components of contemporary national identities in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe: Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. The research will also include other social identities as alternative or complementary to national identities.The research area will be the media created in the space of Web 2.0, linked to the so-called participatory culture. The combination of the paradigms of Web 2.0 and participatory culture produced the phenomenon of prosumption, where narratives are created through a mutual interaction of content creators and consumers. The studied narratives can be found in video productions, memes, profiles on social media sites, Wikipedia articles, and blogs, among other things. The source base in the study of online resources includes the following historically-themed media: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, as well as selected portals, blogs, and forums,also supported by the resources of Wikipedia and Google.The preliminary results of studies conducted among the Polish consumers of historical content in the Internet (a survey of more than 2,200 users of historically-themed social media) are indicative of significant generational changes not only between digital natives but also between Generation Z and Millennials. Visual culture plays an important role here, influencing the formation of narratives and their popularity: 76% of respondents indicated YouTube as their source of historical knowledge (52% indicated Facebook). Due to the specific nature of Web 2.0 and the technical aspects of the studied artifacts, the study will use computational and statistical methods, relatively innovative in the field of historical studies. These include information theory tools belonging to the field of data science, which will be used not only in the quantitative analysis of metadata but also as part of the statistical linguistics approach.