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.

Keywords

• visual social media
• commemoration
• digital memories
• instagram
• photography