Imaging the National Day: Tracking the Commemoration Practices across Visual Social Media Spaces

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a preliminary study, which utilizes a hashtag-based approach and mixed-method procedures to describe the nexus between commemoration practices and visual social media. It mainly focuses on Instagram hashtags for the Day of the Republic of Srpska, a disputed and controversial public holiday celebrated on the 9th of January in the Republic of Srpska, to track how commemoration practices related to national memories are shaped through the process of digital (re)mediation.

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

“…Several studies engaging with the post-war period in Europe focused on the dissonant heritage of the collapse of Yugoslavia and its aftermath on SNS (Baumann, 2020; Brentin, 2016; Damcevic and Rodik, 2018; Mahmutović and Baraković, 2021; Pogačar, 2011; de Smale, 2020; Knudsen, 2016). Other topics in the second part of the 20th century included the difficult heritage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1968–1998 (Crooke, 2018; Murphy and Aguiar, 2019) and the collapse of Portugal’s colonial power and subsequent fall of Salazar’s dictatorship in the 1980s (Peralta, 2019).…”

“…Collective memory was also related to the notion of the construction of national identity (Farrell-Banks, 2019). In addition, multiple studies engaged with theorisations emerging in the context of the recent ‘media turn’ in memory studies, such as the concept of ‘digital memories: memories stored, shared, and promoted online’ (Khlevnyuk, 2019; Mahmutović and Baraković, 2021; Pogačar, 2011; Rutten, 2013), Andrew Hoskins’ notions of the ‘multitude’ (Aouragh, 2015; Yachin and Tirosh, 2021) and ‘connective memory’ which ‘highlights the moment of connection as the moment of memory’ (Birkner and Donk, 2020; de Smale, 2020), as well as Astrid Erll’s work on transnational cultural memory (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2020) and its remediating effects in shaping the present (Kaprāns, 2016; Mylonas, 2017).…”

An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites

“…symbolic reality permeates actual reality (Ibrahim, 2016) in places which, after pierre nora , are identified as lieux de mémoire , both offline (Arrigoni & Galani, 2019; Zalewska, 2017) and online (Sumartojo, 2020). social construction here is situated in the process of semiosis (Damcevic & Rodik, 2018; Mahmutović & Baraković, 2021). symbols and symbolic memory are also actualized through rituals (Brentin, 2016; Koskinen-Koivisto, 2019; Rutten et al, 2013; Wight, 2020), which, along with narratives , produce and sustain myths (Ibrahim, 2016, 2017; Khlevnyuk, 2019; Kozachenko, 2019; Makhortykh, 2020; Ndlovu, 2018; Peralta, 2022; Rutten et al, 2013).…”

“…The remediation of traumatic experience and its heritage—notably, the memory of the Holocaust on Youtube—has not only positive aspects (Gibson & Jones, 2012; Kansteiner, 2017; Makhortykh, 2019), but also implies contestation (Carter-White, 2018; Manca, 2021). Related frequently occurring concepts to remediation , drawing from on the work on andrew hoskins , are media memory and connective memory (Birkner & Donk, 2020; Carter-White, 2018; de Smale, 2020; Mahmutović & Baraković, 2021; Makhortykh, 2019, 2020; Rutten et al, 2013). Interestingly, the notion of mediatized memory appears more often than the concept of mediatization , defined by mediatization theory as a (meta)process whereby media become constitutive of social phenomena (Lundström & Sartoretto, 2022).…”