The Social Flow of Historical Narratives and its Many Names

Abstract

This paper is a first, partial, and short exposition of a larger research project on the phenomenon of the social flow of historical narratives, which is named for the first time here. It presents a preliminary analysis of four different Western scholar traditions that arose at the end of the twentieth century to understand this phenomenon, although the representatives of these traditions were not completely aware of it: the West German tradition called it Geschichtsdidaktik (History Didactics), the British/Californian/American tradition called it Public History, the Parisian/French tradition called it Lieu de Mémoire (Places of Memory) and the Soviet/Russian tradition called it ?????????? ?????? (Social Memory). This analysis is based on Data Science/Digital Humanities methods related to semantic networks and used Linux and Python scripts to compare these four corpora. The main goal of this project is to present the differences between the official definitions and the semantic-based definitions to help scholars from these fields to think over their tradition on further research. The main conclusion of this study is that, although these four traditions are designed to deal with the same problem (the social flow of historical narratives), the analysis of the semantic networks of their corpora indicates that they have followed completely different paths. We have also noted some inconsistencies between the official discourse of these traditions and their semantic networks, which were described throughout the text.