Instead of going to the library or the archive, we increasingly access history, the past, through the web. But what kind of history or histories, past or pasts are we accessing online? And what does this accessing entail? Following Leong et al., we approach temporality on the web “as a multiplicity of times derived from relations between different elements (2009, 1279)." This project is specifically focused on contentious historical moments, pasts that have had and potentially still have a major emotional impact, and which have been subject of struggle. Moreover, we not interested in sites specifically devoted to history, but in the major platforms on the web.

Confronting the historical events on the various platforms and opening up to a multiplicity of time we immediately realized that the traditional linear conception of time does not work online. First, most platforms do no not work in a chronological fashion, but with a reverse chronology. Second, because the platforms order sources according to ‘relevance’, the chronology of the sources as they are presented to us is radically mixed up. Third, sources do their own trick with time as well. Some focus on the historical event itself, while other rework the event. This reworking happens in a wide variety of ways, for example, by metaphorically invoking the event, by turning it into a historiographic debate, or by incorporating the event in a personal account (reading a history book, visiting a historical site, listening to a song). Crucially, in some of these reworkings, the event is actualized as controversial. These temporal complications directly informed our research, analysis, and visualization.

The above considerations translate in the following research questions:

Source time: Do we primarily find contemporary sources or historical sources in the various spheres? Does this vary across controversies?

Historical time: Do the sources on a platform focus on the historical moment itself, or a contemporary reworking of the moment? Does this vary across controversies?

Heat of the controversy: Is the controversy treated as settled, or is it actualized as still controversial? Does this vary across platforms and controversies?