A new PhD
thesis on the formation of collective memories and Wikipedia has recently been published online by Michela Ferron (University of Trento). (available here).
The
abstract begins: “Collective
memories are precious resources for the society, because they contribute to
strengthening the emotional bonding between community members, maintaining
groups cohesion, and directing future behavior. Understanding the formation of
the collective memories of emotional upheavals is important to a better
comprehension of people's reactions and of the consequences on their
psychological health. Previous studies investigated the effects of single
traumatizing events, but few of them applied a quantitative approach to analyze
the different psychological processes associated to the collective memories
formation of upheavals on a large scale. This thesis explores the opportunities
of applying quantitative methods to the study of collective memories in a
collaborative environment such as the English Wikipedia. First, the presence of
commemoration processes in Wikipedia articles and talk pages about traumatic
events will be investigated through the analysis of edit activity patterns.
Second, natural language processing techniques will be applied to detect
differences in the collective representations of traumatic and non traumatic
events, in the temporal focus of old and recent traumatic events, and in the
representations of natural and human-made disasters. Third, the temporal
evolution of language related to emotional, cognitive and social processes will
be analyzed in the talk pages of two different emotional upheavals, the 2005
London bombings and the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The results will confirm the
interpretation of Wikipedia as a global memory place, and highlight specific
psychological processes related to the formation of collective memories of
different types of traumatic events, opening the way to the quantitative study
of collective memory formation in digital collaborative environments.”
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