Negotiating history on YouTube: An interdisciplinary approach to historical documentation in the digital sphere

Social media have changed the one-way communication typical of mass media and created new spaces for communication, digital agoras, in need of new analytical frameworks. Reception theory and multimodal text analysis are applied to one such digital agora, YouTube, to investigate three dimensions of political discussion around the Greek Civil War: i) how the historical documentary Greece: the Hidden War represents historical “events”; ii) the position the film agents take vis-à-vis the historical “truths”; iii) the reaction of the public to those representations. The integration of a third approach, memory studies, allows us to look at specific cognitive processes and strategies at play in how producers, f ilm agents and viewers negotiated history, by employing retrospective memory, life-story narrations, and the public’s collective meta-memory narrations. The paper advocates a multidisciplinary approach to ideology research in digital media and illustrates its application through a case study. Multimodal analysis provides a framework within which different modes, as well as their combination, can be interpreted as to their rhetorical effects. Reception theory focuses on the viewers’ comments on the YouTube channel to explore their engagement with the documentary and its context. Finally, memory studies address specific cognitive processes at play in this digital agora.