Chimite | Vernacular History: A Concept Under Construction
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2023-03-09

Yara Fernanda Chimite | Feevale University, Brazil

 This talk presents some of the results of an ongoing research centred on the relationship between social media and History. The main goal is to investigate how people in informal, non-professional settings talk about historical facts and interact with historical fonts. The initial empirical study, here presented, was conducted on internet memes, more specifically “medieval memes”, which are a meme trend that uses medieval manuscript illuminations and other historical art pieces as the background for humorous productions, usually about contemporary issues. Despite often being perceived as trivial and shallow, internet memes are cultural products, therefore carry ideas, concepts, and feelings of the social groups in which they are created and shared (Shifman, 2014). The analysis was carried out on a Reddit community, r/trippinthroughtime, at the time formed by over 2.8 million members, and the corpus consisted of 121 posts, totalling over 18 thousand comments. From these conversations, I observed that the memes oftentimes sparked some users’ interest in the background images, leading to collaborative processes through which the subreddit’s community would go about identifying and interpreting the medieval works. Such processes are characterized by the interaction between medieval imaginaries and multiple sources, including academic research, Wikipedia, documentaries, fictional works, and even primary sources. From this I have been building the concept of a “vernacular history”, drawing mainly from studies on cultural memory (Erll; Nünning, 2008; Assmann, 2011) and collective intelligence (Lévy, 2007). Vernacular history comprises the complex assemblage of dynamic discussions, sharing of knowledge, discovery and exchange of facts and curiosities, contestation and reinforcement of stereotypes, all of which are argued and negotiated within the community, resulting in multiple and fragmented ideas about the past.

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