Everyday memory: a computational analysis of changing relations between past and present in Dutch newspapers in the 20th century

Abstract

Abstract This article proposes a data-driven approach to memory culture by quantitatively studying the phrase ‘n years ago’ in a set of Dutch newspapers throughout the larger part of the 20th century. In a pipeline consisting of three parts, it looks at (1) the most frequently used time frame (in years and decades) that newspapers use to look back at ‘n years ago’, (2) trends in the use of the most common variants of this phrase through time, and (3) the actual years that are referred to by means of this phrase. By doing so, this article substantiates Aleida Assmann’s claim of an increasing entanglement of past and present after Second World War, while showing that this fundamentally looks like what is here called ‘everyday memory culture’. Rather than the establishment of a canon of landmark years that newspapers increasingly come back to (e.g. 1929, 1940, or 1945), the past that Dutch newspapers invoke on a daily basis is mostly informed by recent and recurrent events in culture, sports, and politics.