The memory remains: understanding collective memory in the digital age

García-Gavilanes, Ruth, Mollgaard, Anders, Tsvetkova, Milena ORCID: 0000-0002-3552-108X and Yasseri, Taha (2017) The memory remains: understanding collective memory in the digital age. Science Advances, 3 (4). e1602368. ISSN 2375-2548

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Abstract

Recently developed information communication technologies, particularly the Internet, have affected how we, both as individuals and as a society, create, store, and recall information. The Internet also provides us with a great opportunity to study memory using transactional large-scale data in a quantitative framework similar to the practice in natural sciences. We make use of online data by analyzing viewership statistics of Wikipedia articles on aircraft crashes. We study the relation between recent events and past events and particularly focus on understanding memory-triggering patterns. We devise a quantitative model that explains the flow of viewership from a current event to past events based on similarity in time, geography, topic, and the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia articles. We show that, on average, the secondary flow of attention to past events generated by these remembering processes is larger than the primary attention flow to the current event. We report these previously unknown cascading effects.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://advances.sciencemag.org/
Additional Information:	© 2017 The Authors © CC BY-NC 4.0
Divisions:	Methodology
Subjects:	Q Science > Q Science (General)
Date Deposited:	12 May 2017 09:38
Last Modified:	06 Apr 2024 02:03
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/76626

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