“War” and “Peace” in the Historical Memory of Modern Russians through the Prism of Interdisciplinary Comparative Analysis: An Associative Experiment via Big Data of Social Networks

Authors of the article compare the findings of the analysis of semantic constructs of historical memory associated with the semantic fields of the concepts of «war» and «peace». The data were obtained through the study of historical representations of users of the social network "VKontakte" based on an array of data using digital technologies, as well as as a result of a free associative experiment of the semantic constructs "war" and "peace" aimed at identifying a person's active attitude to the objects under study through their representation in his active vocabulary and determining the emotional and referential components of the word. The associative experiment, in turn, was aimed at discovering the active attitude of a person to the objects under study through the representation of concepts in their active vocabulary and determining the emotional and referential components of the word. A combination of historiographic (history of memory), psycholinguistic (methodology of associative experiment) and digital (applied intellectual analysis of big data) methods is applied within the framework of an interdisciplinary comparative approach. The authors establish correlations between ideas about basic semantic plots, emotional-evaluative connotations and value constructs of «war» and «peace», which form the basic narratives of the collective memory of participants in historical communities of the social network «VKontakte», in comparison with the practices of the living everyday language of modern Russian society. The authors come to the conclusion that the technology of free associative experiment allows to significantly supplement the results of big data analysis to identify the structure and event hierarchy of military-historical narratives of thematic network communities linking different historical eras, by outlining the boundaries of semantic associative fields of concepts significant for the semantic constructs of «war» and «peace» and determining the specifics of their existence in the living language of modern Russian society. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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