[Air-L] Wikihistories mailing list

Sun Mar 12 17:19:05 PDT 2023

Please see the CFP for the 2023 inaugural wikihistories conference (titled “Wikipedia and its implications for memory (and forgetting)”. Abstracts are due this Friday the 17th of March.

Please also consider joining the mailing list https://groups.google.com/g/wikihistories if you’re interested in Wikipedia and history making.

All best,

Heather.

---------------------------
Dr Heather Ford
Associate Professor and Head of Discipline, Digital and Social Media<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uts.edu.au%2Ffuture-students%2Fcommunication%2Fdigital-and-social-media&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=UVF3GsmbsPqksCLwOqTbLVIYIYebejCFq0u0w1ycbAM%3D&reserved=0>
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“Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmitpress.mit.edu%2F9780262046299%2Fwriting-the-revolution%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=HRXnPoQjZUPostX0KYupYyJXOu7J8e71AdQtDIQrNRc%3D&reserved=0>” MIT Press

University of Technology Sydney
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
PO Box 123. Broadway NSW 2007 Australia

I acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and the Boorooberongal People of the Dharug Nation upon whose ancestral lands our campuses now stand. I pay my respect to Elders past, present and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this place.

https://wikihistories.net/2023-conference/<https://wikihistories.net/2023-conference/>

wikihistories 2023: Wikipedia and its implications for memory (and forgetting)

June 7th/8th 2023 for participants from the Asia-Pacific (1000-1300 AEST<https://time.is/1000_8_June_2023_in_Sydney/Johannesburg/SGT/London/Berlin/Los_Angeles?wikihistories_2023_day_1>).

June 8th/9th 2023 for participants from Africa and Europe (1600-1900 AEST<https://time.is/1600_9_June_2023_in_Sydney/Johannesburg/SGT/London/Berlin/Los_Angeles?wikihistories_2023_day_2>).

Call for papers

>From its earliest beginnings shortly before 911 [1], Wikipedia has documented history as it happens. Revolutions [2], terrorist attacks, earthquakes [4], fires and floods have been written about on the platform, often within minutes of the first recorded protests, attacks, and blazes. This practice of documentation, conducted by volunteers who are connected by shared interest rather than shared expertise, falls between the disciplines of digital journalism and history. What does Wikipedia’s coverage of events “that haven’t even stopped happening yet” [5] mean for history-making on the platform? Researchers have noted that recent events are covered more than early history [6], and stories are more often presented from colonialist rather than local perspectives [7]. More recently, Wikipedia has been uncovered as a site of both conscious forgetting and the “frenzy of commemorations,” [8] a venue for nationalist propaganda projecting particular stories that favour particular ideologies and social groups.

  *   How does Wikipedia construct history and collective memory?
  *   Does Wikipedia enable the forging of a collective memory via consensus? [9]
  *   How are some versions of the past pushed to the fringes?
  *   What gets remembered and what gets forgotten?
  *   How can we study history-making on the platform?

In this first annual workshop of the wikihistories project, we will take stock of what we know and what we still need to know about Wikipedia as a history-making platform. We do this because Wikipedia’s representation of history matters. Its facts travel through knowledge ecosystems and rest as answers to questions provided by digital assistants, search engines and other AI-enhanced tools. Wikipedia’s claims to neutrality are more a hope than a promise, a guise that hides the dreams and ideologies of the individuals and groups that understand its power and are determined to master its form.

We invite Wikipedia scholars and researchers to participate in a two-day symposium being held online on the 8th and 9th of June. Please send an abstract of 250-300 words to michael.falk at uts.edu.au<mailto:michael.falk at uts.edu.au> before March 17 (close of day anywhere in the world) responding to any of the above questions. We expect a mixture of both analytical and methodological contributions for the event which will be held annually for the 3 years of the wikihistories project.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

This year’s symposium will feature a keynote by Dr Simon Sleight<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/simon-sleight>, Reader in Urban History, Historical Youth Cultures and Australian History at King’s College, London. Dr Sleight is the co-editor of History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present<https://www.routledge.com/History-Memory-and-Public-Life-The-Past-in-the-Present/Maerker-Sleight-Sutcliffe/p/book/9781138905849> (Routledge, 2018) and will provide a rich background to our investigations of collective memory from the history discipline for an interdisciplinary audience.

Our second keynote speaker will be Dr Shira Klein<https://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/shira-klein>, Associate Professor of History at Chapman University. Her recent article on “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust” has garnered tens of thousands of views since its publication in February, has received media coverage in English, Polish, Hebrew, German, and Spanish, and has triggered a rare self-initiated action of English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee.

This project is supported by the Australian Research Council<https://www.arc.gov.au/> Discovery Programme.

[1] Brian Keegan, “An Encyclopedia with Breaking News,” in Wikipedia@ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution, ed. Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2019), 55–70, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12366.003.0007<https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12366.003.0007>.

[2] Heather Ford, Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2022).

[3] Bunty Avieson, “Breaking News on Wikipedia: Collaborating, Collating and Competing,” First Monday, April 30, 2019, https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i5.9530<https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i5.9530>; Christian Pentzold, “Fixing the Floating Gap: The Online Encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a Global Memory Place,” Memory Studies 2, no. 2 (May 2009): 255–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008102055<https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008102055>.

[4] Brian Keegan, Darren Gergle, and Noshir Contractor, “Hot off the Wiki: Dynamics, Practices, and Structures in Wikipedia’s Coverage of the Tōhoku Catastrophes,” in Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym ’11: The 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, Mountain View California: ACM, 2011), 105–13, https://doi.org/10.1145/2038558.2038577<https://doi.org/10.1145/2038558.2038577>.

[5] “All the News That’s Fit to Print Out,” New York Times (Online) (New York: New York Times Company, July 1, 2007.

[6] Graham, Mark, Scott Hale, and Monica Stephens. “Geographies of the World’s Knowledge.” 2011.

[7] Brendan Luyt, “The Nature of Historical Representation on Wikipedia: Dominant or Alterative Historiography?,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 6 (2011): 1058–65, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21531<https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21531>; Bunty Avieson, “Two Wikipedias in Bhutan: Problems and Solutions for Knowledge Equity in the Digital Age,” Asian Journal of Communication 32, no. 5 (September 3, 2022): 399–416, https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2021.1937248<https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2021.1937248>.

[8] Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 85.

[9] Brendan Luyt, “Wikipedia, Collective Memory, and the Vietnam War,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67, no. 8 (2016): 1956–61, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23518<https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23518>; Pentzold, “Fixing the Floating Gap”; Marlon Twyman, Brian C. Keegan, and Aaron Shaw, “Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collaboration and Collective Memory around Online Social Movements,” in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 2017, 1400–1412, https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998232<https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998232>.

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