The paper examines the construction of collective memory around the Arab Spring on the Arabic and English Wikipedia articles. It analyzes the temporal evolution of the articles' content similarity across languages using measures of event salience, deliberation, contextualization, and consolidation.
The key findings are:
Salience: The Arab Spring remains a salient topic in both the English and Arabic Wikipedia, with the English article showing greater variation in size and content over time compared to the more stable Arabic article.
Deliberation: The English article exhibits more diverse deliberation processes, with outlinks clustering into "stable", "debated", and "forgotten" categories, while the Arabic article has fewer distinct clusters.
Contextualization: The outlinks used to contextualize the Arab Spring differ significantly between the language editions, with the English article referencing more Western and political philosophy concepts, while the Arabic article focuses more on Middle Eastern events and structural elements.
Consolidation: The Arab Spring article is much more frequently referenced in English-language articles about countries and events involved, compared to the Arabic-language articles, suggesting varying degrees of consolidation of the event within the broader collective memory.
These findings highlight the divergent collective memory processes around the same major historical event across linguistic and cultural contexts on Wikipedia.
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arxiv.org
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by H. Laurie Jo... at arxiv.org 04-17-2024
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.10706.pdfDeeper Inquiries