Scraping the Monumental: Stepan Bandera through the Lens of Quantitative Memory Studies

In this essay we use the example of Stepan Bandera to demonstrate the effectiveness of web-scraping methods as a tool to explore how people interact with memory content online. Using data from Wikipedia, Twitter and YouTube, we analyse the traces left by users interested in Stepan Bandera and assess how these differ between Ukraine, Russia and Poland. Applying data mining and content analysis to data traditionally analysed from a purely qualitative perspective, we show how Polish content about Bandera follows completely different patterns in comparison to Ukrainian and Russian debates. Our tools, made available online, also include attempts at analysing video content.