Tuesday 7 January 2020 – Frédéric Clavert (Luxembourg) – Commemorating the Great War on Twitter

This seminar is 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm, 7 January 2020, in Room N304, Institute of Historical Research. The IHR is in the North block of Senate House, University of London. Find Senate House on Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU. It will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

Session chair: Tessa Hauswedell

Abstract: From 2014 to 2018, many countries commemorated the Centenary of the First World War. Compared to previous anniversaries of the Great War – notably the 50th and 75th anniversaries –   the media context of the Centenary was quite new, marked by the emergence since the 2000s of social media and especially social networks online such as Twitter or Facebook. This seminar will present the results of research based on a corpus of more than 9 millions tweets related to the Great War or its Centenary collected from April 2014 to the end of November 2019 and will discuss how Twitter,  and more generally social media, are reframing the ways in which we commemorate the past.

Frédéric Clavert, assistant professor at C2DH (University of Luxembourg), initially specialised in the history of the economic and monetary organisation of the European continent in the 20th century. He then turned to digital history, looking in particular at artefacts of memories of the First World War and its centenary on social media. His next research project will focus on unsupervised online discussions among European citizens about the EU.