Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Nowadays, the digital ecosystem of social media platforms has evolved into a dynamic arena in which historical narratives are reconstructed, debated, and transmitted by a wide audience. Thousands of platforms (such as X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Telegram) have been created not only to share information, but also to exchange daily moments, opinions, and public criticism on issues such as politics, health, commerce, the arts, and others. Some platforms have taken on a solely commercial nature, even though this was not their original goal. As can be observed, their influence on society has risen to the point where new professions have emerged, and social media has become a source of income or increased income for enterprises and freelancers.

In the context of digital public history, social media platforms have shaped and strengthened their practices and modalities of communication. As public digital platforms, social media aid in the renegotiation and reinterpretation of the past. Users can use hashtags, viral posts, images, videos, and reels to identify themselves, promote and express their identities, and create their own historical narratives. In this aspect, social media offers scholars access to a variety of recent historical data and social memories, allowing them to better understand how the past is distributed and reinterpreted in the present.

            This study investigates into how the Greek Revolution of 1821 is reconstructed and refined in modern online environments, where individuals have unlimited freedom of expression independent of physical or acquired personality traits. To get insight into the circumstance, it examines real user-generated social media data from certain time periods that are relevant to the historical issue at hand. To be more exact, we will use data from 2021, which coincides with the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution (1821–2021) and was preceded by the pandemic-related lockdown. It is worth noting that the period of quarantine was a major stimulus for the increase in online production of massive amounts of information on a daily, if not per second, basis, since most activities moved from the physical to the online sphere. Drawing on themes from digital public history, oral history theory, and visual culture studies, the research project depicts social media as a vernacular digital conversation: a space where everyday people construct, reconfigure, and negotiate representations of the past in real time.

            More specifically, we are seeking at a small but carefully curated collection of posts - artworks, images, and texts - with keywords related to 1821 (e.g., "Greece 1821 - 2021", "1821", "Kolokotronis", "Greek Revolution," "Filiki Eteria," "heroes," etc.), as well as a purposeful sampling of digital artworks and memes that circulated during the Revolution's 200th national anniversary. Because of their textual nature, data protocols from social media platforms such as X will be processed and analyzed using natural language processing algorithms, as well as other machine learning algorithms such as word frequency and engagement. The purpose is to identify users' repeating emotional patterns as well as their overall perspective on a certain historical topic of national significance. The textual dataset is analyzed using keyword extraction, emotion analysis, topic classification, and vector-based frequency segmentation to uncover prevailing emotional patterns, frequent semantic terms, and user emergent content.

Finally, the primary goal of this research is to identify potential recurring emotional patterns communicated by online users about an important issue, such as the Greek Revolution, and to determine how memory is subsequently reshaped and preserved in these ephemerals but freely accessible digital spaces. These findings reveal not simply what users communicate, but also how they emotionally engage with their historical past. Overall, this research suggests that these digital behaviors could create a modern form of digital public history, allowing anybody to get involved in the ongoing negotiation and reinterpretation of national memory. The findings may serve as a starting point for broader discussions about the democratization of historical expression, the value of emotional affect in public history, and the methodological possibility of applying computational approaches in humanities disciplines.