North African protests

On 17 December 2010 Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit vendor in the central town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire in front of a local municipal office. On 25 January 2011 Cairo was shocked by a series of protests against the government. In the following days, the protests quickly spread across the countries and finally led to the departure of the Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from the country on 14 January 2011, and to the resignation of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011. These happenings since their very beginning received an extensive mediatic attention. However, in addition to this they also triggered an intense activity on the related articles on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia (see for example the articles “2011 Egyptian revolution” and “Tunisian revolution“).

Traumatic events like these are inherently shocking for the involved comunities and involve different layers of the social and cultural tissue. For these reasons they are deeply connected to the formation of the emergent collective memory and collective identity of these communities. The widespread diffusion of Web 2.0 services and technologies and the massive participation to social networking websites provide researchers with new opportunities to study the progressive formation of collective memories about these events since their very beginning.

In fact, since Wikipedia records every edit made to every pages by every user (registered or anonimous), it is now possible to study these memory building processes as they unfold an on a large scale, without going through laboratoy-based experiments and self-reports (which may be biased, especially when it comes to deeply traumatizing events like these).