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Narratives of Memory on Twitter: The Case of the Día de la Lealtad [Loyalty Day] in Argentina

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Collective Memory Narratives in Contemporary Culture

Abstract

On October 17, 1945, a vast popular mobilization marched over the Plaza de Mayo to demand for the release of Juan Domingo Perón. Since then, that day has been considered the origin of Peronismo [Peronism], one of the most significant political movements in Argentine history. The commemoration of that event, which later came to be called Día de la Lealtad [Loyalty Day] was modified over time by the peronistas [Peronist], and motivated a variety of historical analyses. Our aim is to expand this series by incorporating the narratives of memory that circulate on Twitter. We analyze a corpus of tweets published between 2009 and 2020. The first of these dates is marked by the availability of the archive of this social media through the Twitter Academic API (v2). The second one, a decade later, refers to when, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, some Peronist groups organized the first virtual mobilization to commemorate the Día de la Lealtad [Loyalty Day], even though digitization of the event had a previous history.

To study the process by which arguments that elaborate past-present relations on Twitter are constructed and interpreted, we use and evaluate some widely spread tools and techniques for the analysis of the Twittersphere. These include analyzing the changes in the volume of tweets by year; identifying hashtags that articulate narratives for and against the commemoration; tracking relevant users for each conversation; studying the circulation of information with the aid of graph networks and analyzing tweet content through distant reading.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The official announcement regarding the end of the free access to Twitter’s API can be found here https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922

  2. 2.

    Over the past years, Visual Network Analysis has become a research field in its own terms. We cannot provide a detailed discussion about this matter here, but a comprehensive analysis of its particularities and strengths, as well of its nuances and biases, can be found on Jacomy (2021).

  3. 3.

    The syntax of that initial query was as follows: “#17O OR #lealtad OR #vivaperón OR #17deoctubre OR #felizdiadelalealtad OR #diadelalealtadperonista OR #diadelalealtad OR #lealtadperonista OR #17oct.”

  4. 4.

    The final query can be found here: https://bit.ly/October17Query

  5. 5.

    These are the pairs that follow according to their magnitude of repetition: #DiaDeLaLealtad-#75Octubres (22,794), #DiaDeLaLealtad-#17DeOctubre (20,840), #17DeOctubre-#DiaDeLaLealtadPeronista (12,922), and #17DeOctubre-#75OctubresDeLealtad (10,876).

  6. 6.

    The pair was followed by #17ODiaDeLaCorrupcion-#17DeOctubre (2376), #17ODiaDeLaCorrupcion-#DiaDeLaLealtad (2.311), and #17ODiaDeLaCorrupcion-#75Octubres (1946).

  7. 7.

    These 5777 hashtags were used 567,012 times, at a rate of 98 uses each. The average is misleading, since the use of hashtags, like retweeting, follows the dynamics of long-tailed distribution phenomena. The top decile of hashtags averages 954 uses/hashtag, while the rest barely reach 3.3 uses on average.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Mar del Plata, Argentina, INHUS, CEHis, CONICET, Mar del Plata, Argentina

    Silvana Ferreyra

  2. Workers’ Innovation Centre – CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Joaquín Rodríguez Cordeu

  3. National University of Mar del Plata, CEHis, CONICET, Mar del Plata, Argentina

    Nicolás Quiroga

Authors
  1. Silvana Ferreyra
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  2. Nicolás Quiroga
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  3. Joaquín Rodríguez Cordeu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Silvana Ferreyra .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Languages and Literatures, Communication, Education and Social Studies, University of Udine, Udine, Italy

    Antonella Pocecco

  2. Departament of Sociology, Social Work and Public Health, COIDESO & ESEIS Research Centers, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain

    Estrella Gualda

  3. Department of Political and Communication Sciences, University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Emiliana Mangone

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Ferreyra, S., Quiroga, N., Cordeu, J.R. (2023). Narratives of Memory on Twitter: The Case of the Día de la Lealtad [Loyalty Day] in Argentina. In: Pocecco, A., Gualda, E., Mangone, E. (eds) Collective Memory Narratives in Contemporary Culture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41921-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41921-8_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-41920-1

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