collective memory case study

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16 Collective Memory: How Groups Remember Their Past

• Published: December 2017
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Studies of collective memory address how people create and maintain a shared representation of their group’s past and group identity. In particular, we conside how knowledge representations and schematic narrative templates (recurring stories of the past) contribute to collective remembering. Diverging memories between groups can cause conflict, so examining how different group’s varying memories of “the same event” can cause misunderstandings is critical. We consider whether (and how) groups can mediate their differences to attempt to reach consensus about the past, using narratives of World War II as a case study. The study of collective memory comprises many different senses of the term remembering , and this chapter emphasizes the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration to examine the issues from multiple perspectives.

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Connecting Collective Memory and Community Resilience: A Case Study of Anaconda, Montana

• Megan Moore University of Montana
• Elizabeth Covelli Metcalf
• Alexander Metcalf

Post-industrial communities across the world are transitioning from industrial economies and identities to an uncertain future. Their successful transitions depend on communities’ abilities to navigate change and maintain a quality of life, or their community’s resilience. Previous scholarship offers resources and capabilities that facilitate or inhibit community resilience such as leadership, social capital, and information. However, collective memory is not well integrated within the community resilience literature. Drawing on data from interviews with 33 community leaders in the town of Anaconda, Montana, we illuminate the impact of collective memory on community resilience. The Anaconda Smelter Stack stands out as a specific landmark and prominent feature of the built environment that perpetuates particular collective memories in Anaconda. We find that collective memory is an integral part of community resilience, where memories can aid in a community’s recovery and rebuilding or constrain thinking and divide viewpoints. We argue that ignoring collective memory’s connections to resilience can undermine efforts to face changes in these communities.

Keywords: Community resilience, collective memory, post-industrial towns, mining

_________________________________________________________________ 

Connecter la mémoire collective et résilience communautaire: une étude de cas d'Anaconda, au Montana

Résumé Les communautés postindustrielles du monde entier sont en transition d’économies et d’identités industrielles vers un avenir incertain. La réussite de leurs transitions dépend de la capacité des communautés à s’adapter au changement et à maintenir une qualité de vie, ou de la résilience de leur communauté. Les bourses antérieures offrent des ressources et des capacités qui facilitent ou inhibent la résilience communautaire, telles que le leadership, le capital social et l'information. Cependant, la mémoire collective n’est pas bien intégrée dans la littérature sur la résilience communautaire. En nous appuyant sur les données d'entretiens avec 33 dirigeants communautaires de la ville d'Anaconda, dans le Montana, nous éclairons l'impact de la mémoire collective sur la résilience communautaire. La cheminée de la fonderie d'Anaconda se distingue comme un point de repère spécifique et un élément important de l'environnement bâti qui perpétue des mémoires collectives particulières à Anaconda. Nous constatons que la mémoire collective fait partie intégrante de la résilience communautaire, où les souvenirs peuvent contribuer au rétablissement et à la reconstruction d’une communauté ou contraindre la réflexion et diviser les points de vue. Nous soutenons qu’ignorer les liens entre la mémoire collective et la résilience peut saper les efforts visant à faire face aux changements dans ces communautés.

Mots-clés : résilience communautaire, mémoire collective, villes postindustrielles, extraction

Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field We invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

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Giovanni Dazzo

In this paper, I explore how collective memory—or, the memories of a group generated through shared experience and values (Halbwachs, 1951/1992)—manifests itself in the process and path toward reconciliation. I seek to understand how theoretical conceptualizations of collective memory apply in transitional justice spaces (Brants & Klep, 2013; Chirwa, 1997), particularly in Guatemala and Cambodia, where political and military leaders did not necessarily take responsibility or offer apologies to affected populations during war crimes trials and truth commissions (Bret, 2016; McGrew, 2011). Through this comparative case study of Guatemala and Cambodia, I am interested in understanding how collective memory has been negotiated and contested through the use of narrative (Klep, 2012).

More specifically, my interest lies in analyzing how narratives—e.g., text, oral histories, art (e.g., street art, community art)—are constructed by affected populations, and whether it seems that these narrative forms contribute to reconciliation or healing. Through this comparative case study, I seek to answer the following research questions: (1) How, and in what ways, have affected populations utilized various narrative forms to negotiate and contest collective memory? (2) Does the narrative process seem to lead to healing or forgiveness, despite the absence of other precursors for reconciliation, such as formal apologies?

For this comparative case study, I have chosen Cambodia and Guatemala based on three criteria, some of which I mentioned above. First, while both countries experienced prolonged periods of mass atrocities and rights violations, trials were held decades after these periods ended. Second, while truth commissions and criminal tribunals have been held, leaders did not offer apologies to affected populations. Last, those who held various roles and responsibilities during each country’s armed conflict continue to remain in some form of (political, military, and/or economic) power; thus, official or national narratives—through political discourse established during war crimes trials or even educational texts, such as history books—create a master narrative that may not memorialize victims or may even seek to hide the past.

Before moving on to the comparative case study of Guatemala and Cambodia, I first outline theoretical conceptualizations of collective memory and reconciliation. I then review how formal transitional justice processes—such as criminal trials and government-led truth commissions—may attempt to formulate (authoritative) collective memories of trauma and injustice, in an effort to establish a national narrative that promotes reconciliation. I then consider how communities in Guatemala and Cambodia have formulated their own collective memories—providing examples of community-led text and art—to counter master narratives established through traditional transitional justice processes (e.g., trials, government-led truth commissions). By juxtaposing formal and community-led narrative processes, I demonstrate how each serves a purpose on the path toward reconciliation. However, I also seek to highlight how formal transitional justice processes can often lead to a national (master) narrative that complicates how affected communities negotiate and construct collective memories to reconcile with past trauma.

Collective Memory and Reconciliation: A Brief Literature Review

In this section, I bring together the concepts of collective memory (Halbwachs, 1950/1980, 1951/1992) and reconciliation (Lederach, 1997). Based on the foundational sociological work of Halbwachs (1950/1980, 1951/1992), an individual’s memories are composed of both an individual and collective element. Although memory was originally seen as a purely cognitive state, or appearing solely in one’s consciousness, Halbwachs (1951/1992) argues that an individual’s memories are often dependent on society and to the groups which we belong. By listening to the recollections of others, an individual places their thoughts within “a collective memory and social frameworks for memory” (Halbwachs, 1951/1992, p. 38). In noting the social and relational aspect of memory, Halbwachs shows the mutually reinforcing nature between the individual and collective. As an individual hears the memories of others within a group—whether these originate from family members, religious groups, or a social class—these recollections can reinforce an individual’s idea of self while further reinforcing their identity within a group. This mutually reinforcing nature between the individual and collective demonstrates how memory may transcend temporal boundaries: As an individual hears collective memories of the past , recollections can encourage present membership within a particular group identity, in turn, bonding them toward a shared future .

Related to Halbwach’s (1951/1992) conceptualization of memory as relational and traversing temporal boundaries, I focus on reconciliation as “a place, the point of encounter where concerns about both the past and the future are met” (Lederach, 1997, p. 27). As Lederach (2005) notes, an integrated framework for peacebuilding can take a number of forms on the path to reconciliation, from (inter)governmental processes, such as truth commissions and war crimes tribunals that seek accountability and public acknowledgment of abuse (Hayner, 2001); restorative justice initiatives that aim to repair victim-offender relationships, such as community circles (Zehr, 2002); and, counseling and trauma healing initiatives to address collective and generational trauma. Lederach (2005) illustrates how these strategies seek to retell stories and experiences—or, in his words, re-story —in an effort to “renegotiate history and identity” (p. 145). However, for affected groups, the recognition and negotiation of this history and identity can become rooted in experiences and recollections of trauma, forming a “collective memory of times when they were deeply violated by the other” (Lederach, 2005, p. 142).

Collective memory, then, becomes a way for groups to recognize a shared past of abuse; in turn, formulating a group identity that provides support and social solidarity in the future (Brewer, 2006). The renegotiation of history and identity, subsequently, becomes a vital concept in understanding how the process of healing and reconciliation is encountered—in formal or community-led processes, or to address individual or collective traumas. In environments of protracted conflict, collective memories may be formed as a consequence of hearing others’ recollections of past trauma, but there also seems to be a need to establish a shared experience and a shared future for reconciliatory purposes.

Collective Memory in Transitional justice

In formal transitional justice processes—such as criminal tribunals and government-led truth commissions—there has often been an attempt to search for facts in an effort to establish “a shared truth about crime and injustice that allows sense to be made of a traumatic past and is a prerequisite for a stable future” (Brants & Klep, 2013). According to Brants and Klep (2013), proponents of these mechanisms state that there is an ability to establish “a coherent collective memory” (Osiel, 1997) or “national narrative” (Minow, 2008). However, Brants and Kelp argue that while these formal procedures may serve the purpose of bringing forth justice, an overreliance on these mechanisms may conflate fact-finding with truth. While these mechanisms may be effective in creating a national narrative for the pursuit of security and stability, critics often argue how collective these “collective memories” can be (Chirwa, 1997; Winter, 2006).

As Brewer (2003) notes, “nations and memory are indivisible” (p. 215). However, if a formal process such as a trial can only use memories if they meet evidentiary requirements, it begs the question of whether the “collective memory” will only serve the State’s purpose of constructing a national narrative, or if it can also provide a space for victims to experience reconciliation. Truth-finding through a purely legalistic process, then, complicates the relationship that the victim-survivor has with the transitional justice process and presents a paradox. Trials provide a space for victim-survivors to bear witness, but if truths are contradictory or memories are blurry, they cannot be corroborated as fact; in turn, confounding the master narrative sought by the court and State.

The process of establishing a master narrative, however, is not solely established through international criminal trials. Processes such as truth commissions are often sought by governments so as to provide “an official version of events” (Brewer, 2003, p. 219). Through a truth commission, there is an emphasis in “producing a report that acknowledges victims’ voices and endows them with official authority vis-à-vis the nation and the world” (Brants & Klep, 2003, p. 43). While trials must follow due process, truth commissions are often designed to serve a restorative function—providing a space where competing memories may reside. However, the purpose behind truth-telling in truth commissions has come under scrutiny as questions arise over their effectiveness in promoting healing (Hayner, 2011) and securing reparations (Laplante and Theidon, 2007).

Phelps (2004) also calls into question how witnesses’ testimonies will be used within a truth commission’s official report—i.e., the basis for the national (master) narrative. For instance, after the Chilean National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Rettig Report (named after lawyer Rául Rettig, president of the Commission) essentially buried the testimonies of victim-survivors by only recognizing the dead or disappeared as victims (Brants & Klep, 2003; Phelps, 2004). While the Rettig Report did acknowledge acts of repression and torture committed under the military regime, it did not acknowledge the role of individual perpetrators. Thirteen years later, the Rettig Report was followed by the Valech Report (named after the president of the National Commission on Political Detention and Torture); however, in this case, it sought to name those who were detained and tortured by the State for political reasons. Similar to the Rettig Report though, the Valech Report did not name perpetrators (Brants & Klep, 2013).

While these government-led truth commissions produced important historical findings on the abuses suffered by the population, both fell short in naming perpetrators. In these reports, the names of victims and survivors are in full display, but the torture and detention they suffered are historically marked as the responsibility of faceless, nameless perpetrators who were never put on trial. With trauma acknowledged but responsibility foregone, it is evident how victim-survivors’ testimonies were co-opted in an effort to authoritatively construct a collective memory that served the State’s objective of national reconciliation. As communities felt their memories were shunned, victim-survivors and human rights groups sought reconciliation in their own manner, through “public manifestations of memory in memorials, monuments, and the creation of visitor centres in former torture and detention centers” (Brants & Klep, 2013, p. 45).

Comparative Case Study: Guatemala and Cambodia

As with the example of Chile, in this section I present a comparative case study of two nations—Guatemala and Cambodia—where victim-survivors and human rights groups have sought to construct collective memories of past trauma. First, I briefly introduce the formal processes (e.g., international criminal trials, government-led truth commissions) taken in each country. I then highlight several examples of how communities have contested the national (master) narrative produced and on display from formal mechanisms.

Formal Transitional Justice Processes

In each country, formal transitional justice processes occurred at varying stages after periods of protracted conflict. In Cambodia, a formal or government-led truth commission was never established after the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, which claimed the lives of over 1.7 million (i.e., one-quarter of the population) from 1975-1979 (McGrew, 2011). Conversely, in Guatemala, a formal truth commission—the Historical Clarification Commission / La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH)—began three years after the signing of the official peace accord in 1996 (Mersky, 2005). The CEH sought to understand how and why crimes were committed. The CEH narrated how anti-democratic sentiment and structural injustices allowed the Guatemalan military to act with impunity from 1960-1996 and showed that 200,000 individuals were killed or forcibly disappeared, with 83% of victims identified as Mayan.

With regard to trials, the CEH recommended that the Guatemalan State was responsible for holding perpetrators responsible. As a result of this recommendation, José Efraín Ríos Montt—who served as a military General during the armed conflict, as well as President of Guatemala—was put on trial after his immunity as a Congressperson ended in 2012. Although he was tried and convicted of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison, this ruling was shortly overturned. In 2016, he died while his case was being retried (Kinzer, 2018).

In Cambodia, five leaders of the Khmer Rouge were arrested in 2007 and transferred to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The first (Kang Kek Iew) was indicted in 2007; the remaining three (Nuon Chea; Khieu Samphan; Ieng Sary) in 2010. The fifth (Ieng Thirith) was declared mentally unfit to stand trial due to Alzheimer’s disease. Kang Kek Iew—who operated the Tuol Sleng torture and detention center—was initially sentenced to 35 years in prison, which was later extended to a life sentence. Nuon Chea (second in charge after leader, Pol Pot) and Khieu Samphan (who acted as Head of State and succeeded Pol Pot) were charged with crimes against humanity and genocide; both received life sentences. Of these five leaders, two are serving their life sentences while the others died of natural causes while in detention. According to official documentation from the ECCC (n.d.-a), the court provides victim-survivors with opportunities for reparation, while spokespersons have gone on the record stating that the court provides a space for reconciliation (Narin, 2017).

With regard to formal mechanisms providing a space for reconciliation in Guatemala and Cambodia, it should be noted that General Ríos Montt and the Khmer Rouge leaders did not offer formal apologies. While some maintained their innocence or denied their culpability, others were unable to remember important details regarding their crimes; thus, exhibiting a collective amnesia (Chandler, 2008), or a “conscious decision to forget” (Brewer, 2006). Although trials and truth commissions seek to understand what happened and to whom, they often seek to establish individual guilt. Herein lies the paradox in stating that these formal processes can establish a collective memory that is intended for reconciliation: Perpetrators’ and victim-survivors’ accounts are pitted against one another, in an effort to collectively produce a memory that can then be used to establish guilt or a version of history (Brants & Klep, 2013). However, if perpetrators exhibit collective amnesia and victim-survivors’ accounts cannot be corroborated as fact, it can complicate the efficacy of establishing a collective memory for the purpose of national reconciliation.

Community-Based Approaches

While formal processes provide a space to seek facts, “they cannot impose shared remembering” (Brants & Klep, 2013, p. 47). Yet, in contexts where high-profile leaders did not offer apologies and denied culpability during formal processes—as done in Guatemala and Cambodia—there is an opportunity to explore how communities have sought to establish a collective memory of the past. In this section, I highlight a number of approaches exhibited by victim-survivors and human rights groups in Guatemala and Cambodia.

Constructing Collective Memory in Guatemala

Although Guatemala agreed to a government-led truth commission in 1994 and the CEH began in 1999, human rights groups questioned its mandate and whether it could produce a useful report (Mersky, 2005). For this reason, the CEH was preceded by a community-led truth commission: The Interdiocesan Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI). This project, led by the Catholic Church and coordinated among several human rights groups, pursued truth-telling by directly engaging communities. From 1995 to 1998, trained volunteers visited communities and collected 6,500 testimonies directly from victim-survivors. As a result, the REMHI Report (1999) was able to document 14,291 separate acts of violence and 401 massacres (noting locations and dates) committed by the military.

Although the REMHI Report did not have a legal mandate and much of its evidence could not be used in court as it did not meet evidentiary standards, this collection of testimonies achieved two important objectives. First, the REMHI Report provided victim-survivors with the space to tell their stories, creating a collective memory of trauma, as directly told by those who experienced abuse. Second, by providing the dates and locations of massacres, it provided a lead for nonprofit organizations such as the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), which could later conduct forensic investigations and begin the exhumation of mass graves.

For instance, after identifying a mass grave site and the remains of over 220 people atop the hills of San Juan Comalapa, a community memorial site was built by FAFG and a victim-survivors group, the National Coordinator of Widows of Guatemala (CONAVIGUA). After exhuming some of these remains over a decade ago, FAFG and CONAVIGUA decided to return the bones to the mountaintop where they were found, in an effort to deliver them back to their families and restore some dignity to those who were killed (Strochlic, 2019). FAFG reinterred bodies of those found next to a memorial that was built by CONAVIGUA. On the nimajay —meaning big house in the Kaqchikel language—are murals painted by community artists.

As shown in Figure 1, the community chose to depict a scene of violence from the armed conflict. As mentioned in the REMHI Report, this mural shows the scorched-earth policy administered by the military regime—as illustrated by the village homes being burned in the background. The scene includes indigenous community members being executed by masked military forces, as well as helicopters flying overhead.

However, unlike the facts heard during trials and truth commissions, the left-hand side of the mural includes a symbolic scene in line with Kaqchikel folklore. This scene depicts nature —as symbolized by a human figure—embracing the bodies of the dead. In this exhibition of collective memory, the Kaqchikel artists chose to show how nature has nurtured the bodies of the dead, having come back to life as corn and sustaining the living community members.

The murals of the Kaqchikel Maya in San Juan Comalapa portrays a collective memory of the past trauma that many in this community witnessed and experienced. However, for many in Guatemala City, the crimes committed by the military regime are a distant past and are only stories told by others. For this reason, artists such as Daniel Hernández-Salazar have sought to remind those in Guatemala City of the forgotten past (Hoelscher, 2008) through street art.

In one example, the artist chose to depict an angel, overlaying a photograph of a scapula (from a photo of a victim’s bones) on that of a man. This photograph, portraying “angels screaming at genocidal trauma” were installed across 36 sites in Guatemala City, facing buildings such as the military intelligence facility, army headquarters, and wealthy suburbs. As noted by Hernández-Salazar, he chose to publicly install these angels as an exercise in pushing against collective amnesia (Brewer, 2006; McGrew, 2011); or, to what he refers to as an “institutionalized forgetfulness… fomented by those in power” (Hoelscher, 2008, p. 197). Although Guatemala held two truth commissions, one formal and one community-based, it is worth noting how those in power can exacerbate an institutionalized forgetfulness, or collective amnesia, that slowly dissipates the collective memory of those who suffered trauma.

Constructing Collective Memory in Cambodia

Unlike Guatemala, victim-survivors in Cambodia did not have formal transitional justice processes until the start of the ECCC in 2007. Thus, how did victim-survivors seek to construct collective memories in the absence of more formal processes? Much like civil society groups in Guatemala, those in Cambodia sought to create their own forms of collective memory by coordinating work that is often done by the state. In the absence of a truth commission, victim-survivors did not have the formal space to provide testimony. Thus, organizations such as the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM) sought to preserve stories of trauma—through systematic documentation and archival procedures—in turn, contributing to the construction of collective memories (McGrew, 2011). Since 1995 (just four years after the Paris Peace Agreements), DC-CAM has sought to educate and inform Cambodians and the world of the crimes committed, often replacing the type of work conducted during a truth commission. Through its systematic procedures, its documentation became a primary source of evidence for the ECCC (McGrew, 2011).

While DC-CAM has employed systematic documentation and archival procedures, other nonprofits have expressly focused on participatory or community-based approaches to peace and reconciliation. Youth for Peace has sought to address the structural injustices intensified by the country’s armed conflict by forming peace education curriculum and various activities (e.g., art workshops) for youth. Youth are able to unpack the traumas of the past by understanding history, as well as negotiating and contributing to collective memories through art.

Additionally, through one of its flagship participatory projects, Youth for Peace organizes intergenerational dialogue and study tours to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, so youth can learn about the genocide. They also hold lessons on facilitation skills and nonprofit management, and youth then create and implement their own projects to constructively contribute to the nation’s collective memories of the genocide. Just as Lederach (2005) notes the necessity to address generational trauma as a way to “renegotiate history and identity” (p. 145), Youth for Peace seeks to further the path toward reconciliation by repairing relationships and addressing shared remembering through narratives.

Much like Youth for Peace, the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center (n.d.-b) in Phnom Penh “opens the doors to large swathes of memory” by acquiring, restoring, and providing free public access to Cambodia’s audiovisual history that was lost during the decades of war. Through its Acts of Memory project, the Bophana Center has created a free online exhibition (Transmissions 2018) on their website, where victim-survivors tell their stories to youth. These intergenerational dialogues have been recorded, allowing viewers to learn about past abuses. As these interviews are recorded, they also provide a digital archive that can be preserved so future generations can view this content and learn about the nation’s history. This initiative was proposed to the ECCC as a project to aid reparation—through public acknowledgment—for the civil parties in Case 002/02 (i.e., the second trail against Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, where charges of genocide, forced marriage, and other grave human rights violations were heard). As noted by the ECCC (n.d.), donors have provided funds for projects that grant moral and collective reparations “to preserve collective memory and restore victims’ dignity”.

Through this partnership between the Bophana Center and the ECCC, there seems to be recognition that public acknowledgment and collective memory may not occur within the confines of the criminal tribunal. Rather, it is apparent that while a formal transitional justice process, such as the ECCC, focuses on its mandate for retributive justice, it is not limited in lending support to community-based organizations that can offer restorative justice. Although the intent behind formal and community-based processes may differ, the ECCC has been able to support organizations such as the Bophana Center, which may be better placed to provide a space for victim-survivors to re-tell their stories outside the legal boundaries of the court.

In the case of the Bophana Center, there is an opportunity to explore how formal and informal (community-based) processes have worked in tandem. By funding these types of organizations, and explicitly mentioning that these projects are for the purpose of moral reparation and restorative justice, the ECCC has shown that the path toward reconciliation can be one of civil society and government partnership. However, as artists and nonprofits across Cambodia have aided communities in constructing collective memories around past trauma, it has been questioned whether the Cambodian people have reached and will sustain a stage of deep reconciliation (McGrew, 2011). Through extensive qualitative research, McGrew (2011) ascertains that many Cambodians still live in a state of shallow coexistence—with perpetrators and victim-survivors living separate lives and simply tolerating one another—rather than a deep reconciliation based on relationships that are “complex, interdependent, and meaningful” (p. 514). From McGrew’s research, it is demonstrated that nonprofits such as DC-CAM and Youth for Peace have conducted vital reconciliatory work; however, few communities have conducted reconciliatory projects of their own. As McGrew’s findings are from 2011—at a time when only one of the ECCC trials had concluded—there is an opportunity for future research to see how formal processes have contributed to the nation’s collective memory and its path toward reconciliation. Furthermore, through examples such as those between the Bophana Center and the ECCC, there has certainly been an evolution in partnership that did not exist when DC-CAM, as a nonprofit, sought to fill a gap by preserving and shaping the nation’s collective memory.

Recent examples in Cambodia provide a glimpse of hope with regard to how formal and informal transitional justice processes can work in partnership. However, the examples in Guatemala continue to show how communities are continuing to contest and counter the national (master) narrative established through the court. While Guatemala’s formal and informal truth commissions are arguably seen as successes, the overturning of Ríos Montt’s verdict shows how formal processes can still be coopted through political means (Brants & Klep, 2013). As Brewer (2006) notes, there is an opportunity for memory to be seen as a peace strategy. However, when former generals have political immunity or when verdicts are overturned, communities—such as those in Guatemala—may feel the need to respond by shaping their own collective memories as a strategy for healing. In Guatemala, this is evidenced through a Kaqchikel community illustrating vivid images of past atrocities at a community-built memorial site. It is also seen through the work of an artist—such as Daniel Hernández-Salazar—who has strategically placed symbolic angels that keep watch over military and government offices, showing that someone may someday hold them accountable for past abuses.

Whether it is in partnership or as nonviolent demonstration, informal processes (e.g., text, street art) can illustrate a community’s reaction or response to formal transitional justice processes. As Chirwa (1997) notes, collective memory becomes a necessary part of healing and reconciliation as it “invokes shared emotions and consciousness” (p. 482). Much like the concept of reconciliation (Lederach, 2005), collective memory (Halbwachs, 1992) is a relational process that goes beyond individual accounts or cognitive capacity. In the cases of Guatemala and Cambodia, there is evidence that victim-survivors and human rights groups may not have felt that formal processes—such as criminal tribunals and government-led truth commissions—achieved truth or justice. As states seek to create a collective memory on the path toward national reconciliation, there continues to be a need to question whether victim-survivors’ memories are preserved and respected within the “collective”; or, if they are simply being used as a tool to contribute toward a master narrative that seeks security and stability over deep reconciliation.

Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center. (n.d.). About the Bophana Center. Bophana . Retrieved from https://www.bophana.org .

Brants, C. and Klep, K. (2013). Transitional justice: History-telling, collective memory and the victim-witness. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 7 (1), 36-49.

Brett, R. (2016). Peace without social reconciliation? Understanding the trial of Generals Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sánchez in the wake of Guatemala’s genocide. Journal of Genocide  Research, 18 (2-3), 285-303.

Brewer, J.D. (2006). Memory, truth and victimhood in post-trauma societies. In: G. Delanty & K. Kumar (Eds.), The sage handbook of nations and nationalism . London: SAGE  Publications Ltd.

Chandler, D. (2008). Cambodia deals with its past: Collective memory, demonisation and induced amnesia. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9 (2-3): 355–369.

Chicuecue, N.M. (1997). Reconciliation: The role of truth commissions and alternative ways of healing. Development in Practice, 7 (4), 483-486.

Chirwa, W. (1997). Collective memory and the process of reconciliation and reconstruction.  Development in Practice, 7 (4), 479-482.

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) (n.d.-a). Victims Participation.  Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia . Retrieved from https://                                  www.eccc.gov.kh/en .

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) (n.d.-b). Wide ranging support secured for the reparations for victims of the Khmer Rouge. Extraordinary Chambers in  the Courts of Cambodia . Retrieved from https://www.eccc.gov.kh/en .

Galtung, J. (2001). After violence, reconstruction, reconciliation, and resolution: Coping with visible and invisible effects of war and violence. In: M. Abu-Nimer (Eds.),  Reconciliation, justice, and coexistence . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Halbwachs, M. (1950/1980). The collective memory . New York: Harper & Row.

Halbwachs, M. (1951/1992). On collective memory . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hayner, P.B. (2011). Unspeakable truths: Transitional justice and the challenge  of truth commissions . New York: Routledge.

Hoelscher, S. (2008). Angels of memory: Photography and haunting in Guatemala City.  GeoJournal, 73 (2008), 195-217.

Kinzer, S. (2018, April). Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemalan Dictator Convicted of Genocide, Dies  at 91. The New York Times , Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com .

Klep, K. (2012). Tracing collective memory: Chilean truth commissions and memorial sites.   Memory Studies, 5 (3), 259-269.

McDowell, S., and Braniff, M. (2014). Commemoration as conflict: Space, memory and identity  in peace processes . Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

McGrew, L. (2011). Pathways to reconciliation in Cambodia. Peace Review, 23 (2011), 514–21.

Mersky, M. (2005). Human rights in negotiating peace agreements: Guatemala . Belfast: The nternational Council on Human Rights Policy.

Minow. M. (2008). Making history or making peace: When prosecutions should give way to truth commissions and peace negotiations. Journal of Human Rights 7 (2): 174–85.

Morris, L. (2017, November 14). ‘A way of healing’: Art and memory in Latin America. BBC News . Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com .

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Narin, S. (2017, March 4). No justice without remembering. Development + Cooperation: D+C . Retrieved from https://www.dandc.eu .

Osiel, M.J. (2008). In defense of liberal show trials – Nuremberg and beyond. In  Perspectives on the Nuremberg Trial , ed. Guénaël Mettraux, 704–25. Oxford: Oxford               University Press.

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Collective Memory as Currency

The dominance of the past in the present.

• Tracy Adams
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• Language: English
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Copyright year: 2024
• Audience: Scholars and students of Memory Studies, Cultural and Political Sociology, Political Communication, Public Discourse.
• Front matter: 10
• Main content: 125
• Coloured Illustrations: 4
• Keywords: Collective Memory ; Currency ; De-Commemoration ; Culture ; Identity
• Published: July 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9783111211763
• ISBN: 9783111211718

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Home > Libraries > PUPOAJ > CLCWeb > Vol. 20 (2018) > Iss. 2

Collective Memory in Advocating Peace. The Nanjing Incident as a case study

Idham Badruzaman , Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta

In his paper "Collective Memory in Advocating Peace. The Nanjing Incident as a case study" Idham Badruzaman provides an example of how to build a peaceful Asian Community. The Foundation is establishing forms of bilateral cooperation at the educational level; mostly in universities and higher education institutions across the world. These programs are contributing to create cross-cultural ties within the Asian Community and across the world, surpassing national interests and boundaries, fostering inter-culturalism, and promoting tolerance amid differences. By focusing on the Nanjing Incident, the paper provides an example of how the building of collective memory can help reconciliation, showing the efforts made by Japan and China to maintain a neighbor-relationship. The study collects information about the different actions undertaken to create a collective memory of the Nanjing Incident in order to turn this public recollection into reconciliation. There have been at least seven efforts made to make public recollection about the Nanjing Incident. They include the following activities: publishing a book about Nanjing, building the National Memorial Hall, Annual Commemoration, setting up a National Memorial Day, registering the inscription with UNESCO, establishing the Peace and Research Institute, and eventually registering the city of Nanjing to become A City of Peace. In addition, there are many other events and elements that are worth-remembering as part of the collective memory for both the Chinese and the Japanese people. All of them are directed to the normalisation of neighbour relations, in the spirit of peace and reconciliation.

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Badruzaman, Idham. "Collective Memory in Advocating Peace. The Nanjing Incident as a case study." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 20.2 (2018): < https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3234 > This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field.

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Digital Oriented Museum Design Based on Collective Memory—Case Study of Bache Old Town

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• Y. T. Liu 14 ,
• Y. W. Q. Liu 14 ,
• G. S. Y. Liu 14 &
• J. Xia 14  

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With socioeconomic development and urbanization, Bache Old Street has undergone significant changes in its spatial structure, cultural features, and traditional way of life. As an ancient canal town in the Grand Canal Cultural Belt, it faces depopulation, inadequate preservation of historic buildings, and the loss of historical and cultural continuity. The erosion of Bache Old Street's cultural roots as a traditional fishing village has severed the inhabitant’s ties with the area. This report aims to explore the concept, medium, and manifestation of collective memory. By employing methods such as fieldwork, visits, research, and the restoration and digital design of old buildings, it proposes the establishment of a digital museum to preserve and develop the collective memory of Bache Old Street. This study offers innovative ideas for sustainable urban regeneration, presenting a digital-oriented museum as a means to realize and preserve Bache Old Street's collective memory in the digital space.

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Liu, Y.T., Liu, Y.W.Q., Liu, G.S.Y., Xia, J. (2024). Digital Oriented Museum Design Based on Collective Memory—Case Study of Bache Old Town. In: Papadikis, K., Zhang, C., Tang, S., Liu, E., Di Sarno, L. (eds) Towards a Carbon Neutral Future. ICSBS 2023. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 393. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7965-3_33

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The memory remains: Understanding collective memory in the digital age

Ruth garcía-gavilanes.

1 Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K.

Anders Mollgaard

2 Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Milena Tsvetkova

Taha yasseri.

3 Alan Turing Institute, London, U.K.

Disastrous events trigger our collective memory of past events to a surprising extent that can be modeled mathematically.

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.

INTRODUCTION

The way individuals collectively remember, forget, and recall events, people, places, etc., has been a prominent topic of research on collective memory ( 1 ). However, the notion of collective memory as a socially generated common perception of an event itself has been introduced and studied only recently ( 2 ), about the time when our society started to become highly connected through new channels of communication. Maurice Halbwachs is generally recognized as the father of collective memory research. Halbwachs developed the concept of collective memory, arguing that individual memories are only understood within the context of a group, unifying the nation or community through time and space ( 2 ). After Halbwachs, different scholars from various academic disciplines have used the concept of collective memory as an interdisciplinary concept. Research on collective memory is often based on theoretical concepts, the study of historical and archival sources, oral histories, case studies, interviews, surveys, and discourse analysis ( 3 ). For example, one group of researchers carried out several interviews to investigate the possible narrative template of younger and older American adults for three wars, namely, the Civil War, World War II, and the Iraq War. Although Americans of different ages recalled similar events, the interpretation of some events changed over the generations: Both younger and older adults recalled the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; however, they differed in how they rated the bombings ( 4 ).

More recently, memory study scholars tend to stress the significance of the media in shaping collective memories: “Culture and individual memory are constantly produced through, and mediated by, the technologies of memory. The question of mediation is thus central to the way in which memory is conceived in the fields of study of visual culture, cultural studies and media studies.” ( 5 ). Under this perspective, offline research methodologies often involve the hiring of coders for content analysis of news and the use of surveys or interviews for analyzing the public memory agenda. For example, a group of researchers ( 6 ) compared “media memory agenda” and “public memory agenda” to understand the influence of the media on the shaping of collective perceptions of the past by asking coders to analyze the content of the news and request the public to fill in surveys. Alternatively, scholars have studied the role of journalists as collective memory agents by manually analyzing the stories journalists tell as professionals and the stories they tell about their profession ( 7 ). In all cases, most of the research methodologies applied on memory studies rely on long and costly procedures.

However, developments in digital technologies in recent years have significantly influenced how we keep track of events both as individuals and as a collective. Digital technologies have also provided us with huge amounts of data, which researchers are already using to study different aspects of our social behavior utilizing automatic procedures on much larger samples of data.

“The Internet doesn’t forget.” On the one hand, the Internet has had strong impacts on memory and the processes of remembering and forgetting, and on the other hand, it has converted collective memory into an observable phenomenon that can be tracked and measured online at scale. Analyzing different Web documents, researchers have shown that more recent past events are remembered more vividly in the present. For example, previous studies ( 8 , 9 ) investigated news corpora and concluded that most of the temporal expressions are from the near past. Campos et al . ( 10 ) analyzed 63,000 Web query logs and found that 10% had temporal references, mostly to the near past or future. Further, Jatowt et al . ( 11 ) studied how microbloggers collectively refer to time and found that although several posts are about past events, the “here and now” is what they mostly refer to and care about.

Aiming to enhance our knowledge of online collective memory, we use pageview logs of articles on Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia. These data provide remarkable granularity and accuracy to study online memory. There is a high correlation between search volume on Google and visits to Wikipedia articles related to the search keywords ( 12 , 13 ). This indicates that Wikipedia traffic data reliably reflect the Internet users’ behavior in general. The high response rate and pace of coverage in Wikipedia in relation to breaking news ( 14 , 15 ) are features that make Wikipedia a good research platform to address questions related to collective memory.

Other researchers have previously used Wikipedia to study collective memory. In particular, Ferron et al . ( 16 – 18 ) thoroughly studied editors’ behavior to confirm the interpretation of Wikipedia as a global memory place. They explored edit activity patterns with regard to commemoration processes, the sentiments of edits in old and recent traumatic and nontraumatic events, and the evolution of emotions in talk pages. However, these studies focused only on editorial activities in Wikipedia; only a few studies address collective memory considering Wikipedia visitors and their patterns of attention. For example, Yucesoy and Barabási ( 19 ) used Wikipedia viewership data to study the popularity and fame of current and retired elite athletes and found that performance dictates visibility and memory. More specifically, Kanhabua et al . ( 20 ) tackle remembering signals using pageviews in Wikipedia to identify factors for memory triggering. They calculate a remembering score made up of different combinations of time series analysis techniques and study how the score varies with regard to time and location. However, this work is limited to empirical observations and fails to give any general understanding of the phenomenon.

Several other prediction tasks have been done using Wikipedia data and metadata. For example, researchers have used Wikipedia viewership data to predict movie box office revenues ( 21 ), stock market moves ( 22 ), electoral popularity ( 23 , 24 ), and influenza outbreaks ( 25 , 26 ). Further, researchers have predicted the click-through rate between Wikipedia pages, which enables determination of which existing and potential Wikipedia links are useful. They performed this analysis using Web server logs ( 27 ) and navigational paths ( 28 ). Researchers have also used pageview counts to predict the dynamics of Wikipedia pages. For example, Thij et al . ( 29 ) predicted that the attention to promoted content on Wikipedia decays exponentially over time.

Using Wikipedia viewership data, we study how new events trigger a flow of attention to past events, which is how we operationalize collective memory. We limit our focus to aircraft incidents and accidents as reported in English Wikipedia, which is the largest language edition of the online encyclopaedia. We quantify and model the attention that flows from articles about recent accidents to articles about past accidents and study the effect of different dimensions of the event on the distribution of attention flow.

To calculate the effect of a new event on the attention to a past event, we pair the pageview time series of the corresponding Wikipedia articles. Here, we focus on all aircraft incidents or accidents reported in English Wikipedia. We call the events that occurred within the period 2008–2016 as “source events” and their Wikipedia articles as “source articles.” We pair the source events with older aircraft incidents or accidents, called “target events,” and their Wikipedia articles, called “target articles” (see Materials and Methods).

As an example, Fig. 1A shows the flow of attention from the Germanwings Flight 9525 accident to the American Airlines Flight 587 accident represented by the viewership time series of their corresponding Wikipedia articles. The Germanwings accident occurred on 24 March 2015, when the copilot deliberately crashed the plane into a mountain in the Alps, thereby killing 150 people. The American Airlines accident took place in November 2001 and was caused by a pilot error, which resulted to the plane crashing into the Bell Harbor neighborhood outside New York, thereby killing 265 people. We see an increase in the views to the American Airlines Flight 587 article on the day of the Germanwings crash and this lasted for several days. Note that there was no Wikipedia hyperlink between the two articles during this period. The area of the shaded region measures the increase of the views to the target article relative to the average daily views of the previous year (Fig. 1A, dashed line), called “prior activity.” We refer to this area as the view flow, and it will be the central variable of interest in our study. The view flow is calculated over the week after the first edit of the source article. In particular, we focus on the first week where the attention is expected to be maximal ( 30 ). Note that any area below the dashed line will count negatively, so the view flow can theoretically be negative as well.

Left: Daily Wikipedia article view count on a logarithmic scale for the Wikipedia articles representing Germanwings Flight 9525 (source) and American Airlines Flight 587 (target). The colored area measures the increase in views relative to the daily average of the previous year (dashed line). Right: View flow from 98 sources (2008 – 2016) to all 123 target events from the period 2000 – 2007. The color of the pixels shows the strength of the view flow on a logarithmic scale. Both axes are sorted according to the date of the accident such that going down or going right brings the reader to more recent events. Some source events, like Germanwings Flight 9525 (see pointer), trigger a lot of target events. We also point to the articles for the 9/11 crashes, which are triggered often and always in unity.

Our data set includes 84,761 pairs of source and target events (see Materials and Methods). In Fig. 1B , we show the view flow from the 98 source events (vertical axis) to all 123 target events from 2000 to 2007 (horizontal axis). We notice that some source events trigger a strong view flow on many target events, whereas others have triggering effect on only few or no target events. In the following section we analyze the influence of a range of factors on the view flow between pairs.

Triggering factors

Here, we limit the analysis to the 11 largest sources (9823 source-target pairs) because the view flow of smaller sources is dominated by the natural noise of the targets (see Materials and Methods). All error bars presented in this section reflect SDs due to sampling error, which are computed using bootstrapping. Presented P values test the hypothesis that the mean of population 2 is larger than the mean of population 1. These are likewise computed using bootstrapping (10,000 samplings). Mann-Whitney U tests have been performed on all presented population pairs and generally yield P values below 10 −9 .

Figure 2A shows the average view flow for different groups of source-target article pairs. As expected, we find that target articles about recent events are triggered much more often than those about older events ( P = 0.000). We find that the number of deaths in the target event has an impact: events with more casualties are more likely to be triggered ( P = 0.000). We also find that the previous viewership of the target articles has a very large impact on the flow of views ( P = 0.000).

Left: Average view flow among pairs belonging to different groups according to different factors. The black bar labeled “All” includes all pairs, the bars labeled “Recent” and “Old” split the source-target pairs into those that are separated by more or less than 29 years (the median separation between pairs). The bars “Many deaths” and “Few deaths” split the pairs according to the number of deaths of the target event (at the median value of 22 deaths). The next two bars split the pairs according to the prior activity of the target article. The bins in dark gray area are based on whether the source and target flights were operated by companies located on the same continent, whether the operating company is located in Europe, Australia, or North America (Western), whether the source and target articles belong to the same article categories, and whether there is a direct hyperlink from the source article to the target article. R ight: The same as in the left panel, but pairs with a hyperlink from source to target have been removed from the sample.

We find very little impact from the location of the operating company of the target flight, namely, whether it is western (North American) ( P = 0.225) or whether it shares the continent with the source flight ( P = 0.282). We further check the effect of having the target and source articles appear in a common Wikipedia category, as an indication of similarity (see Materials and Methods). We find that a shared category has a very large impact on the view flow ( P = 0.000). Finally, we check whether there has been a link from the source article to the target article during any of the 7 days under study. We observe that a direct hyperlink has a huge impact on the viewership flow ( P = 0.000). However, by removing all linked pairs (75 pairs) and performing the same analysis, we get the same qualitative findings (see Fig. 2B ), except that western companies now are triggered significantly more often ( P = 0.020). The average view flow only drops by 32%, thereby showing that links are not the main driving force responsible for view flow.

Up to this point, we analyzed the view flow considering all variables as binary; but we can get even better resolution with analysis of numbers of years of separating events, numbers of deaths, and prior activity. In Fig. 3A , we show the view flow as a function of years of separation between the source and target events. Although the error bars are rather large, it is clear that there is a strong drop in view flow over the first 45 years. In Fig. 3B , we show the view flow as a function of numbers of deaths involved in the target event. As expected, there is increased view flow with large numbers of deaths, but surprisingly, there is greater view flow to target articles about events with no deaths compared to those with small numbers (~20) of deaths. The average view flow drops from 1112 ± 242 for events with zero deaths to 159 ± 37 for target events of ~20 deaths. One possible explanation is that events with zero deaths are reported in Wikipedia because they are remarkable in some other way. Hijackings are a major contributor, but there are other examples, such as the 1940 Brocklesby mid-air collision, where two planes collided mid-air and got locked together but still managed to land safely. In Fig. 3C , we present (in log-log scale) the view flow as a function of the prior activity of the target article, again measured 1 year before the source event. The trend nicely follows the fitted power law Ce α x , with C = 2.19 ± 0.24 and α = 1.23 ± 0.03. The goodness of fit is R 2 = 0.999, whereas a linear fit only yields R 2 = 0.737.

Left: Average view flow against the separation in years between source and target event. Center: Average view flow against the number of deaths involved in the target event. Right: Average daily views of the target article during the year before the source event. A power law fit with an exponent of 1.23 is also shown.

Although the source articles, combined, received 7.4 million views during their respective first weeks, we estimate the combined view flow to all the target articles to be 10.5 million. The ratio between the two is 1.42 ± 0.26, thereby indicating that the flow of attention is, on average, greater than the attention received by the main event itself. If we remove all linked pairs, then we are still left with a ratio of 0.96 ± 0.24. These results tell us that view flow is not a minor player in attention dynamics, but rather a driving force, at least in Wikipedia, even if we cannot generalize this finding to the whole Internet.

Modeling remembering

In the previous section, we showed that online views of two different articles can be strongly coupled. Therefore, one cannot describe the attention to a topic as an isolated phenomenon. We will now model the coupling between the source and target and thereby show that a big fraction of the target views may be explained from the source views alone. More formally, we aim to predict the views of a target article y based on the views of a source article x and a number of factors that couple the two. The goal is to maximize the coefficient of determination in predicting y . We introduce a model with three terms

The first term, y offset , comes from the fact that some target articles receive more attention than others on average. We model this as y offset = a history ⋅ y history , where y history is the average weekly views for the previous year. With this term alone, we are able to explain 24 ± 9% of the variance among the target views. The estimate is based on a fivefold cross-validation, and the error bars are given by the spread in the results of the five samplings. We then include view flow mediated by links ( y link ) in the model. To do this, we estimate the number of views to the source article that is exposed to a link to the target article and call this variable “exposure to target link” represented as x link (see Materials and Methods). We then model link flow as y link = a link ⋅ x link , which in combination with y offset allows us to explain 30 ± 8% of the variance in the views among the target articles.

The final term in the model, y triggered , represents triggering of memory. Three conditions must be met for a source event to trigger the memory of a target event. First, one must hear about the source event, and second, one must already have the target event stored in his or her long-term memory. Finally, the coupling between the two events needs to be sufficiently strong to trigger the memory. We expect the number of people who hear about the source event to be proportional to the number of views to the source article, which we name x . Likewise, we expect the number of people who have the target event stored in their memory to be proportional to the previous average views of the corresponding target article, y history . Finally, there is the coupling between the two events α, which is the probability that hearing about the source event will trigger the memory of the target event. The first-order approximation of the triggered views can then be written as

For simplicity, we model the coupling using a linear combination of the remaining variables (indexed as z i )

Here, we have not included geographical variables, which proved to be negligible in the above analysis. Instead, we have used information regarding years of separation, numbers of deaths in the target event, shared Wikipedia category (0 or 1), and target article link (0 or 1). By including the triggering term in the model, we increase the explained variance from 30 ± 8% to 35 ± 11% (see Materials and Methods for parameter values).

We introduced “view flow,” or the attention to an old topic induced by a new topic, as a quantitative measure of remembering. We then used this measure to study the factors of remembering for the case of aircraft accidents and incidents, using data from Wikipedia. In particular, we studied how time, similarity, geography, previous attention, and links affect the view flow from a source event to a target event. We found that the memory of an aircraft incident effectively lasts around 45 years. This 45-year limit might reflect the fact that people who were adults at the time of the accident might not use Wikipedia, or may have died in the interim or simply may have forgotten about the accident during that time interval, such that only written records are left in the end. Incidents with either many (50+) or no deaths are remembered the most on Wikipedia. The latter result may be explained by a bias in Wikipedia, which tends to keep records of “no death” incidents only if they are remarkable in some other way. If we reinsert the data points into the fitted model ( Eq. 1 ), then we reproduce the U shape, despite the fact that the model is linear in the death variable. This indicates that the U shape is not inherent to the deaths but is rather contained in the other variables.

Generally, we do not find that geographical similarity has any significant impact on remembering aircraft incidents, even though the level of attention paid to individual incidents is considerably driven by location ( 30 ). Links were found to greatly increase the view flow between source and target, but because they are only present for a small fraction of source-target pairs, they cannot explain most of the observed view flow. It is worth mentioning that the flow between pairs without a direct Wikipedia link remains as an open question because our data do not provide any explanation of the underlying mechanisms. The reported flow could be mediated by the external channels online or offline. Of more general importance is the previous attention to the target article, which has a superlinear effect on the view flow. This shows that regardless of the strength of the coupling between events, some past events are consistently more memorable. The view flow is especially strong when the source and target are similar in some way, as measured by a shared Wikipedia category.

Overall, we find that a source event induces a combined view flow, which on average is ~142% of the views given to the source event itself. This tells us that view flow is a major force that should not be ignored. Interaction between signals has previously been studied in economics ( 31 ) however, signal interactions are not included in current models of social spreading. The typical approach in previous studies is to make predictions for the popularity of a topic based on the recent history of that topic alone ( 32 – 35 ). Future models should not consider spreading phenomena as stand-alone objects but should also account for cross-correlations. Concepts, ideas, videos, and so on are not stand-alone objects but instead form a large network with attention flowing from one to another.

We made a first attempt to model remembering. We proposed to model remembering with a product between the current attention to the source event, the previous attention to the target event, and a coupling between the two. The rationale behind this model is threefold. To trigger the memory of the target event, one must hear about the source event, the target event must already be stored in long-term memory, and the coupling between the two events must be large enough to trigger the memory. Our model allowed us to explain 35% of the variance in views among the Wikipedia articles about target events. Note that no information regarding the internal dynamics of the target article views was used to produce this result. A big limitation of our model is the linear expression for coupling between articles, which, if improved, might allow much more variance to be explained. Furthermore, we do not account for any spreading processes induced by the triggering of memory. These processes might be responsible for the superlinear relationship observed in Fig. 3C .

In summary, we argue that the flow of attention between different events and concepts is mediated by memory or, more generally, associativity. We find that source events generate a flow of attention to previous events, which is even greater than the attention given to the source itself. A first model to explain remembering in the case of airline crashes has been provided. The theoretical framework and the mathematical formulation in Eq. 2 can be easily generalized to explain collective online memory in a broader context, whereas the coupling α must be modeled to fit the particular setting.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Data collection.

We collected data from Wikipedia using two main sources: MediaWiki API and Wikidata, using https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/WikidataR/index.html . The MediaWiki API is a Web service that provides access to wiki features, data, and metadata of articles such as links and categories. On the other hand, Wikidata is a Wikipedia partner project that aims to store structured data from other Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, and fix inconsistencies across different editions ( 36 ). Examples of such structured data include the date or geographical coordinates of an event.

We focused on a set of articles in English Wikipedia in the categories “aviation accidents and incidents by country” and “aviation accidents and incidents by year” and their subcategories. These categories cover all airline accidents and incidents in different countries and throughout history that are available in English Wikipedia. Using the MediaWiki API, we obtained 1606 articles from which 1496 are specifically about aircraft crashes or incidents (we discarded articles of biographies, airport attacks, etc.). Furthermore, we extracted editorial information for the articles in the data set: the date when the article was created, the alternative names for the article through time, and the article links and categories. We collected the links from the page history for the 7 days after the first edit of the article and for each link, and we calculated the fraction of the day that it remained in the article. For the 1496 articles, we systematically collected structured data from Wikidata: the date of the event, geographical coordinates of where the event occurred, number of deaths, and the continent of the aircraft company. Unfortunately, Wikidata did not have complete information for all articles. To remedy this deficiency, we obtained the missing data by automatically crawling Wikipedia infoboxes, using https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/WikipediR/index.html , or manually checking the information in the articles.

Finally, we extracted the daily traffic to the articles between 01 January 2008 and 10 April 2016 from the Wikipedia pageview dumps available at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/ through a third-party interface, http://stats.grok.se . There are no data available before this interval. We used the alternative title names of each article to merge all traffic statistics to the current title. Article views have been normalized according to the global traffic of English Wikipedia, which is available at https://tools.wmflabs.org/ , such that all views correspond to the January 2015 values.

The source articles were created in Wikipedia within the period 01 January 2008 and 10 April 2016. These articles have viewership data available from the moment they were created to the last day of the period. To capture the immediate attention to a source event right after its occurrence, we chose the corresponding source articles created up to 1 day after the source event. Furthermore, we removed small source events that are proximate to large source events. This was done to avoid false positives, that is, small sources that are credited with the view flow triggered by large source events. We defined proximity by a 10-day range because the main attention of an aircraft event has been shown to decay over this time scale ( 30 ). The process of removing false positives was performed as follows: (i) we sorted all the source articles by their total number of views during the first week in Wikipedia; (ii) starting from the article with the most views, we removed all source articles that were created within a 10-day range; and (iii) we continued with the next article with the highest views and repeated (ii) and so on. In the end, this procedure left us with 98 source events.

We then paired each one of the 98 source events with target events from our entire data set such that each of the target events occurred at least 2 years before the source event. This assured that the views of the target article had at least 1 year to stabilize such that the calculation of the average views before the source event is representative. In the left panel of Fig. 4 , we justified the 1-year stabilization period by showing that the view average stabilizes after approximately 300 days. The 2-year separation criterion reduced the number of source-target pairs from 189,430 to 144,773.

Left: View curves of all articles from 2008 to 2016. The vertical axis measures the average views during the 1-year sampling period. The horizontal axis determines the period used for sampling. Specifically, it determines the days of separation between the incident and the beginning of the sampling period. Note that the computation relaxes after approximately 1 year of cooling. We therefore require that sources and targets are separated by at least 2 years because this ensures that the target has relaxed before sampling its average view rate. Right: We show the average view flow from each source against the views of that source during the same period. The dark dots represent the 11 largest source events, which were used in Triggering factors: Malaysia Airlines flight 370, Malaysia Airlines flight 17, Air France flight 447, Germanwings flight 9525, 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash, Indonesia AirAsia flight 8501, Asiana Airlines flight 214, 2011 Lokomotiv Yaroslavl air disaster, Metrojet flight 9268, and Colgan Air Flight 3407. The smaller source events (light blue) have not been included because noise dominates in this region.

In Triggering factors, we restricted our study to the 11 largest sources with the argument that the noise of the view flow is comparable to the signal for the smaller sources. We illustrate this in Fig. 4 , which shows the average view flow from any target to its sources. The error bars were computed as the spread in the target views during the year before the source event. We removed all sources below the 11th largest source because the natural noise of the target views dominates in this region, as illustrated in Fig. 4. Our analysis has also been applied to the complete set of sources, which yielded the following changes to the results: The average view flow is a full scale smaller, and the noise is a bit more dominant. The effects of categories and geography are enhanced, whereas the superlinear effect of the previous views on the view flow almost disappears.

Category similarity

Categories in Wikipedia form a pseudohierarchical structure, and their function is to group other regular Wikipedia articles to a common subject ( 37 ). In general, categories are socially annotated, and editors can classify an article into a category simply by appending one to it. The categories appended to a Wikipedia article are generally found at the bottom of it. Here, we considered the common categories among target and source Wikipedia articles as a similarity feature.

In the context of this project, hyperlinks are internal links in Wikipedia linking a page to another page within English Wikipedia. The blue hyperlinks are an essential feature in Wikipedia because an article can often only be understood in the context of related articles, and internal links make it easy to explore this context ( 28 ). Here, we predicted the views of the source article flowing to the target article due to an internal link in the source article. To do this, we used “exposure to target link” ( x link ) as an independent input variable for predicting the views of the target article. The variable was calculated using the revision histories of the source articles, which allowed us to track the fraction of a given day with an internal link to the target article. We then constructed x link by multiplying this fraction with the number of views of the source article in that day. In the prediction model, we added the resulting number of views for all the days considered in the prediction, which, in this case, is 7 days after the source article was created.

Parameter values

In Table 1 , we show the fitted parameter values with error bars estimated from 10,000 bootstrapping samples. The a linked parameter is part of the coupling constant and should not be confused with a link , which is in the y link term.

Least square fit of the parameters in the model to the data. Error bars are estimated using bootstrapping.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. for making data dumps of Wikipedia freely available and for building an application program interface that provides convenient access to wiki features, data, and metadata. Funding: This research is part of the project Collective Memory in the Digital Age: Understanding Forgetting on the Internet funded by Google. T.Y. has been supported by the Alan Turing Institute under the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant EP/N510129/1. Author contributions: R.G.-G. collected and analyzed the data, participated in the design of the study, and drafted the manuscript; A.M. analyzed the data, participated in the design of the study, and drafted the manuscript; M.T. participated in the design of the study and helped draft the manuscript; T.Y. designed and coordinated the study and helped draft the manuscript. All authors gave final approval for publication. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors.

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Collective Memory, Visual Communication, and Symbolic Interactions with Statues: The Case of the Charging Bull of Wall Street

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This research is concerned with individuals’ symbolic interactions with the Charging Bull statue. We chose this statue because it is an extremely popular tourist attraction and the most visited nonhuman statue in New York City. However, there is no research devoted to understanding how visitors interact with the statue. To fill this gap in the literature, we examine people’s interactions as a unique way of communicating with the Charging Bull statue in New York City through a photo analysis approach. Using the general framework of symbolic interactionism, the paper investigates poses, gestures, and more generally interactions of individuals near or with the statue to gain insights into the impact of the Charging Bull beyond a mere visual representation. The findings reveal various forms of interaction, including souvenir photography, active participation, unexpected interactions, and public-made symbolism. This study of these interactions contributes to the literature on collective memory and the study of statues. Additionally, this research highlights the inventiveness of the dynamic relationship between individuals and statues as symbols in the urban environment.

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• symbolic interaction

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T1 - Collective Memory, Visual Communication, and Symbolic Interactions with Statues

T2 - The Case of the Charging Bull of Wall Street

AU - Mubasher, Annosha

AU - Liao, Tim F.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2024 by the authors.

PY - 2024/7

Y1 - 2024/7

N2 - This research is concerned with individuals’ symbolic interactions with the Charging Bull statue. We chose this statue because it is an extremely popular tourist attraction and the most visited nonhuman statue in New York City. However, there is no research devoted to understanding how visitors interact with the statue. To fill this gap in the literature, we examine people’s interactions as a unique way of communicating with the Charging Bull statue in New York City through a photo analysis approach. Using the general framework of symbolic interactionism, the paper investigates poses, gestures, and more generally interactions of individuals near or with the statue to gain insights into the impact of the Charging Bull beyond a mere visual representation. The findings reveal various forms of interaction, including souvenir photography, active participation, unexpected interactions, and public-made symbolism. This study of these interactions contributes to the literature on collective memory and the study of statues. Additionally, this research highlights the inventiveness of the dynamic relationship between individuals and statues as symbols in the urban environment.

AB - This research is concerned with individuals’ symbolic interactions with the Charging Bull statue. We chose this statue because it is an extremely popular tourist attraction and the most visited nonhuman statue in New York City. However, there is no research devoted to understanding how visitors interact with the statue. To fill this gap in the literature, we examine people’s interactions as a unique way of communicating with the Charging Bull statue in New York City through a photo analysis approach. Using the general framework of symbolic interactionism, the paper investigates poses, gestures, and more generally interactions of individuals near or with the statue to gain insights into the impact of the Charging Bull beyond a mere visual representation. The findings reveal various forms of interaction, including souvenir photography, active participation, unexpected interactions, and public-made symbolism. This study of these interactions contributes to the literature on collective memory and the study of statues. Additionally, this research highlights the inventiveness of the dynamic relationship between individuals and statues as symbols in the urban environment.

KW - collective memory

KW - New York City

KW - public space

KW - statue

KW - symbolic interaction

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85199644691&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85199644691&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3390/soc14070097

DO - 10.3390/soc14070097

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85199644691

SN - 2075-4698

JO - Societies

JF - Societies

Discover Aboriginal Experiences launches 4 member case studies on sustainable tourism for Earth Day 2024

Mabu Buru Tours, Broome, Western Australia © Tourism Australia

Media release

A collective of quality, authentic, Aboriginal-guided tourism offerings, Discover Aboriginal Experiences (DAE) is delighted to launch four case studies on collective members going to extraordinary lengths when it comes to sustainable tourism, whether that relates to protecting the environment, community, culture – or all three.

The launch of the four case studies coincides with upcoming Earth Day 2024, falling on 22 April. The case studies also tap into recent figures published by Statista , which show that more than 80 per cent of global travellers regard sustainable travel as important to them, and that they were willing to adopt sustainable travel incentives something that has led the global eco-tourism industry to be worth US$172.4 billion.

Indeed, the vast majority of experiences offered by members of the DAE collective fall into this category. These four case studies profile Mabu Buru Tours in Western Australia; Sand Dune Adventures in New South Wales; Wajaana Yaam in New South Wales; and Maruku Arts in the Northern Territory. The case studies are detailed below in Appendix 1. Interviews can be arranged by request.

Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples don’t see a piece of land as something to fence off and own. Nor do they look at the bush as a place to extract as many resources as possible. They don’t regard waterways as reservoirs to feed mass plantations. Instead, they see themselves and the land as one.

The world’s oldest living cultures have been embracing sustainability long before it became fashionable to lower food miles and use plant-based plastics. For at least 65,000 years they have lived in harmony with the environment, adhering to a reciprocal relationship that honours, rather than exploits the land. The Earth is their mother, a force that enables their existence in return for care and respect.

“The Indigenous connection to Country is fundamental across the DAE collective, as is sharing of culture through tourism, fostering a thriving living culture and economic and physical wellbeing of communities, and telling uniquely Australian stories,” says Nicole Mitchell, Executive Officer Discover Aboriginal Experiences. “We’re delighted to spotlight four of our members who stand out in these fields. There are so many others – and we will develop our portfolio of case studies in the coming months. We hope this inspires guests and journalists to rethink and recognise the immense positive impact that the growing demand for Aboriginal tourism is having.”

It's this ongoing commitment to sustainability that saw the DAE collective recently acknowledged in Travel + Leisure’s Global Vision Awards 2024, announced in the lead-up to Earth Day to recognise the many companies, individuals, destinations and non-profit organisations that are leading the way in developing a more sustainable travel industry.

Editor's note:

Trade and media can access information on each operator in the collective as well as images and logos from the Trade and Media section of the website, here . Keep up to date and be inspired via our Connect to Country digital magazines. A collection of royalty-free Aboriginal tourism images and videos are available here . Please see the dropdown menu for Discover Aboriginal Experiences.

The Discover Aboriginal Experiences collective is part of Tourism Australia’s Signature Experiences of Australia program that promotes outstanding tourism experiences within a variety of special categories. This collection showcases a diversity of experiences delivered by the world’s oldest living cultures, creating memorable trips for adventure seekers, culture enthusiasts, foodies and nature lovers, ranging from exploring hidden rock art galleries to foraging for native delicacies, stand-up paddleboarding on culturally significant waterways to bedding down at wilderness lodges in serene natural settings.

Each member of the Discover Aboriginal Experiences collection is considered a world-class leader in Aboriginal tourism, representing local Aboriginal cultures with integrity and authenticity.

Appendix 1: Case studies

Case study 1: mabu buru tours, kimberley, western australia.

Mabu Buru Tours is the brainchild of Johani Mamid, a proud Indigenous man born and raised in Broome in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. His guided experiences take guests on a deep dive into culture, allowing you to savour seasonal fruits, meet local wildlife, and delve into ancient lore and traditions. More than a tour, it’s an immersive cultural journey fostering understanding of Aboriginal life and history. And by learning about it, you’re helping preserve it.

Mabu Buru donates 50 per cent of profits from the ‘3-day Broome Ultimate Aboriginal Culture Expedition’ to the Mabu Buru Foundation , an Aboriginal not-for-profit organisation dedicated to ensuring the survival and preservation of Indigenous culture through continued practice and knowledge sharing.  The Foundation’s objectives include ‘Cultural Practice and Knowledge Sharing’, ‘Training and Employment’ for local Aboriginal people, ‘Cultural Tourism’ experiences, ‘Conservation and Environment’, and ‘Community Engagement.’

Funds are then used via a number of initiatives. Among them are workshops and training programs to facilitate cultural practices, knowledge transmission and skill development among cultural practitioners and emerging talents. “A big goal of ours is to protect knowledge,” says Johani. “We've created a business that helps to bring together corporate Australia and Indigenous products and services and Indigenous businesses, which of course not just helps the corporate Australia companies, it also helps Indigenous businesses to connect with opportunities we find for them and create for them to see.”

The foundation also channels funds into caring for Country by supporting initiatives that contribute to environmental conservation, land management, and the preservation of significant cultural sites and practices. Johani and his team also believe education is key, and they work with schools, organisations and community groups to deliver cultural awareness programs, educational resources and activities that promote a deeper understanding and appreciation of Indigenous culture. And the Foundation helps create jobs and business opportunities for Aboriginal people, promoting entrepreneurship and supporting economic development initiatives that align with cultural values and aspirations.

Case study 2: Sand Dune Adventures, Port Stephens, NSW

There’s something about zooming down the largest shifting sand dunes in the Southern Hemisphere that makes you understand why Port Stephens, a two-hour drive north of Sydney/Warrane, is such a special place, and has been to the Worimi Aboriginal people for millennia. Here, Sand Dune Adventures ’ adrenaline-pumping quad-bike tours take guests across Stockton Bight Sand Dunes in the Worimi Conservation Lands, covering some 4,200 hectares. This part of New South Wales is off-limits to most people – unless you’re with a Worimi guide and have good screaming lungs.

Sand Dune Adventures combines this thrilling quad-biking adventure with unique cultural preservation as you journey through bushland, in and around enormous sand dunes – you’ll learn about traditional Aboriginal food and history, as well as the dunes’ significance to Indigenous communities.

Sand Dune Adventures is owned and operated by the Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Council . Guides are all Worimi peoples; “Our tours are not about profit, they’re about people and sustaining culture,” says Andrew Smith, CEO of the Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Council. More than that, Sand Dune Adventures also funds the Murrook Cultural Centre , who’s purpose it to gather, sustain, protect and teach Aboriginal Culture to all people with an emphasis on Worimi culture. 

“We’ve trained dozens of Aboriginal local people in our business,” says Andrew, noting that the centre now employs more than 45 staff and has grown from having four quad bikes to being able to accommodate more than 100 guests at any given time. “We have a whole series of people who can be Aboriginal tour guides, they can ride the quad bikes, they know the local history, they’re trained in business administration and marketing. All the things required to run a successful business. We also do training in natural resource management… we get our elders and Traditional Owners and knowledge holders out on Country with some of our younger generation and start talking about respect… discovering a combined balance in the ecosystem between our traditional natural resource management values and scientific values.”

This forward-thinking centre is fundamental when it comes to gathering, sustaining, protecting and teaching Aboriginal culture, catering to everyone from school groups to community businesses, government groups and international travellers. It’s also used by the local Aboriginal community as a gathering place. Aboriginal staff teach various facets of culture, ranging from boomerangs to weapons and tools, art and dance, bush food and medicine, craft and more.

The Council also funds a ‘green team’, dedicated to the rehabilitation and regeneration of natural environments alongside urban-based environmental education. Part of this has been the establishment of a nursery at Murrook. “We also have a botanist, ecologist and archaeologist. We do seed collection and create stock supplies for our nursery to sustain native plants indigenous to this region. There are a lot of rehabilitation sites looking for native plants. We’re here with a long-term investment,” says Andrew.

And the return to the community? “Social Adventures Australia worked out that for every $1 we invest into our businesses, it’s giving around a $25 return to a family. That’s a massive investment into our people.”

Case study 3: Maruku Arts, Ulu r u, Northern Territory

In the Northern Territory’s heartland, near the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Ulu r u, Maruku Arts has been contributing to cultural sustainability for more than 35 years, helping to preserve Aboriginal practices like painting, drawing and carving through sharing these traditions with visitors and local employment.

Owned by A n angu (Aboriginal people from the Western and Central Deserts of Australia), Maruku offers the opportunity for guests to peruse an extensive range of paintings and distinctive punu (wooden carvings) by some 900 A n angu artists from 25 different communities, depicting Creation stories and places. Everything is ethically sourced and sold. Beyond supporting these artists via the retail gallery, this outback art centre offers hands-on dot-painting workshops, where you’ll be guided by a local A n angu artist to learn about the traditional art form, symbols and tools, creating your own artwork.

Maruku not only sells art from its local community Mutitjulu at Ulu r u, but also sends staff to remote communities across the NPY regions (Pitjantjajatjarra, Yangkuntjarra, Ngaanyatjarra Lands) of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia, to purchase woodcarvings – it has been doing this since 1984. In 2019 alone, it invested $1.5 million dollars into 22 different communities across the central and western deserts, funding tour guides and environmental training, among other cultural facets.

“As Maruku Arts celebrates 40 years, it's a testament to our longevity and sustainability,” says Lauren Woodward,  Maruku’s manager cultural tourism and events. “Maruku Arts stands as a beacon of cultural preservation and community empowerment.”

Case Study 4: Wajaana Yaam Adventure Tours, Coffs Harbour, NSW

The Gumbaynggirr people of the New South Wales Mid-North Coast have been paddling its waterways for tens of thousands of years, their ancestors using their knowledge of the tides to travel long distances in dugout canoes carved from hollowed tree trunks. Wajaana Yaam Adventure Tours continues this tradition via its stand-up paddleboarding tours, which are held on three idyllic waterways within the Solitary Islands Marine Park: the OFFICIAL Coffs, Moonee and Red Rock Creeks. While paddling, you can admire the fish darting through crystal clear waters as your Aboriginal guide brings the Dreaming to life, and introduces you to some coastal bush tucker.

But more than being a scenic way to see the coast, Wajaana Yaam has its eye on the future – much of the company’s profits are reinvested from tourism activities back into the community. The company’s founder, Clark Webb, also established Bularri Muurlay Nyanggan Aboriginal Corporation (BMNAC) in 2010, with the overarching goal of sustaining local culture on Country. Over the last 14 years, the organisation has set up three learning centres, among other achievements.

Arguably the biggest achievement to date has been the 2022 opening of the Giingana Gumbaynggirr Freedom School , the first bilingual school in NSW of an Aboriginal Language. “The aim is to revitalise the Gumbaynggirr language, as currently it is listed as endangered, while also education on Aboriginal culture, purpose, traditions and identity,” says Clark. “It’s of the utmost importance that our children can attend a school that holds their culture and the land in the highest regard.”

In 2022, the school opened with 15 students; in 2023 there were 52 students and this year there are 85… with a waiting list. This is a 100 per cent Aboriginal student school.

The BMNAC is also planning to open the Yilaami Eco-Resort, with capacity to cater for 40 guests and including an on-site restaurant and facilities that connect people with an array of cultural tourism experiences. In addition to offering a minimum of 12 permanent jobs, profits from the Yilaami Eco-Resort will provide the main source of funding for the Gumbaynggirr Giingana Freedom School, says Clark.

For media enquiries, contact:  Nicole Mitchell Executive Officer, Discover Aboriginal Experiences T: +61 410 499 525 E: [email protected] W:  discoveraboriginalexperiences.com

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We acknowledge the Traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Owners of the land, sea and waters of the Australian continent, and recognise their custodianship of culture and Country for over 60,000 years.

*Disclaimer:  The information on this website is presented in good faith and on the basis that Tourism Australia, nor their agents or employees, are liable (whether by reason of error, omission, negligence, lack of care or otherwise) to any person for any damage or loss whatsoever which has occurred or may occur in relation to that person taking or not taking (as the case may be) action in respect of any statement, information or advice given in this website. Tourism Australia wishes to advise people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent that this website may contain images of persons now deceased.

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Title: slicing input features to accelerate deep learning: a case study with graph neural networks.

Abstract: As graphs grow larger, full-batch GNN training becomes hard for single GPU memory. Therefore, to enhance the scalability of GNN training, some studies have proposed sampling-based mini-batch training and distributed graph learning. However, these methods still have drawbacks, such as performance degradation and heavy communication. This paper introduces SliceGCN, a feature-sliced distributed large-scale graph learning method. SliceGCN slices the node features, with each computing device, i.e., GPU, handling partial features. After each GPU processes its share, partial representations are obtained and concatenated to form complete representations, enabling a single GPU's memory to handle the entire graph structure. This aims to avoid the accuracy loss typically associated with mini-batch training (due to incomplete graph structures) and to reduce inter-GPU communication during message passing (the forward propagation process of GNNs). To study and mitigate potential accuracy reductions due to slicing features, this paper proposes feature fusion and slice encoding. Experiments were conducted on six node classification datasets, yielding some interesting analytical results. These results indicate that while SliceGCN does not enhance efficiency on smaller datasets, it does improve efficiency on larger datasets. Additionally, we found that SliceGCN and its variants have better convergence, feature fusion and slice encoding can make training more stable, reduce accuracy fluctuations, and this study also discovered that the design of SliceGCN has a potentially parameter-efficient nature.

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