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Abstract
This essay explores the #sota39 project by the Finnish National Broadcasting Company YLE. The project is a chronological representation of the Finnish Winter War produced for the social media platform Twitter. The project remixes authored material with content produced by the project’s consumers to provide a multivocal representation of a seminal historical era which seems to excel in invoking experience to its readers. How can historical characters be transfigured to relive 105 days of national crisis, after 70 years of its passing, through a strict chronology and on a social media platform, in a manner that connects with contemporary media consumers and still maintains its relevance as a historical project? The social media form is radical for historians, yet well suited for presenting chronologically proceeding events. The authors consider #sota39 to be an example of a well-made and successful experimental history project. In this essay our attention is not in the content of #sota39 but in its experimental format, use of historical sources and the historiographical consequences. This paper analyzes the complexities of the #sota39 project to fully appreciate its nature as a historical endeavour and to understand the possibilities and support it offers traditional history in the digital era.
Notes
2. The authors of this paper neither professionally nor voluntarily participated in the project.
3. The count of tweets under @sota39 changed from 2543 (6 July 2015) to 2508 (6 December 2015) during the writing of this paper, which highlights this instability.
4. The main account was followed by over 8600 users during the time of our analysis, while individual secondary accounts produced for the project also counted followers over a thousand each in June 2015.
5. Another form of validation is the favourite functionality, but this is less central for the purposes and argumentation presented here and will thus not be discussed further.
8. The account @sota1939 (https://twitter.com/sota1939) is promoted as the project’s main account. The Swedish and English accounts consisted of 1444 and 890 tweets respectively at the time of our analysis, but they do not feature a similar network structure as the main account, lacking narrative retweets from other accounts. See Kosola et al. Citation2015 (in Finnish).
9. For copyright reasons, the authors were not able to provide a screenshot of the feed, but would like to refer to four separate, chronological tweets in the narrative to showcase its format. See @sota1939 2015, March 5a, @mattila_pekka 2015, March 4, @sota1939 2015, March 5b, @vaino_tanner 2015, March 5.
10. Cayce Meyers and James F. Hamilton have recently argued that social media could be considered a (post)modern genre for history. They have four main reasons for this: (1) social media is fragmentary, (2) it upsets chronological ordering, (3) it necessarily creates multiperspective interpretation and (4) it has a dialogical capability that separates it from conventional historical works (Myers and Hamilton Citation2015, 230–232).
11. For details, see Bryant (Citation2011).
12. One such project is produced by University of Cambridge and their Scott Polar Research Institute (https://twitter.com/scottslastexp), while the other’s (https://twitter.com/captainrfscott) motivations and affiliations remain unclear.
13. Twitter accounts @jk_paasikivi, @risto_ryti, @kyosti_kallio, @jujo_niukku, @vaino_tanner, @kotirintama_kV, @jo_soderhjelm, @uuno_hannula.
14. For a more thorough analysis of the possibilities of information commons and similar themes, see Benkler (Citation2006).
15. ‘Yleissivistys’ in Finnish or ‘allmänbildning’ in Swedish, whose purpose is dictated by Finnish law. http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/1993/19931380#L3
16. Losing only to the combined category of ‘compulsory education, compulsory school, and free education’. (Torsti Citation2012, 99–101).
17. For example, the cabinet discussions presented are from Murhenäytelmän Vuorosanat: Talvisodan hallituksen keskustelut (edited by Ohto Manninen and Kauko Rumpunen, 2003, Edita), which is a collection of official cabinet proceedings, transcripts of cabinet discussions and passages from members’ private notes.
18. Robert A. Rosenstone’s Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Citation1995) has been a central piece for the acceptance of film as form of historical representation. What is of note here is that the year that Rosenstone’s book was published, film celebrated its one hundredth birthday (La sortie des usines Lumière premiered on March 22, 1895). We hope that the discussion of the presentational form that social media offers for historiography does not take 90 years to begin.
19. It won an award for Best Weekly Documentary in Finland (Niemi Citation2015).
20. Who in turn is quoting the Castilian Crónica general from the thirteenth century.