This article presents a study of the social organisation of the national memories of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (the Baltic states). It draws inspiration from and expands the scope of the application of Eviatar Zerubavel’s largely unexplored methodological tools for the study of calendars. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is threefold. First, this article offers an application of the above tools to the case of the Baltic states. Second, by doing so, it provides an overview of comparative patterns within Baltic calendars. Third, it is argued that by exposing the social organisation of national memory, this approach offers insight into silences, providing an entry point for an engagement with amnesiology, as coined by Liedeke Plate.

The focus of the article is the analysis of a particular site of collective memory (one state’s system of national holidays condensed in a calendar) from a perspective that highlights its relational and narrative characteristics. By adopting the idea of “commemorative networks,” the article will regard commemorated events as nodes in a network, connected by ties that highlight the causal relationship between any two events as perceived by the commemorating agencies in the making of narratives of the state. This approach offers a methodologically sound complement to other perspectives that investigate the formal narrative and semiotic features of “collective memory.”

Collective memory processes have been studied from many different perspectives. For example, while psychology has investigated collaborative recall in small groups, other research traditions have focused on flashbulb memories or on the cultural processes involved in the formation of collective memories of entire nations. In this article, considering the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a global memory place, we analyze online commemoration patterns of traumatic events. We extracted 88 articles and talk pages related to traumatic events, and using logistic regression, we analyzed their edit activity comparing it with more than 370,000 other Wikipedia pages. Results show that the relative amount of edits during anniversaries can significantly distinguish between pages related to traumatic events and other pages. The logistic regression results, together with the transcription of a group of messages exchanged by the users during the anniversaries of the September 11 attacks and the Virginia Tech massacre, suggest that commemoration activities take place in Wikipedia, opening the way to the quantitative study of online collective memory building processes on a large scale.

This article analyzes the continuation of anti-war groups and activists in Serbia who were in opposition to wars in the 1990s and, in the decade after October 2000, are still in struggle. Activism often analyzed as part of the “Dealing with the Past Projects” is here analyzed in the context of social memory studies contributing to the understanding of current memory work and memory activism in Serbia. Drawing on Eviatar Zerubavel’s analysis of calendars as sites of social organization of national memory, this text looks at the emergence of alternative calendars as formed and created by anti-war and human rights activists. By analyzing the emerging alternative civic calendar in Serbia, I discuss memory activism as related to the commemoration of the Siege of Sarajevo and the Omarska concentration camp. I then extend my analysis on what I see as the most apparent and significant day on the emerging civic alternative calendar: 10 July annual commemoration of the victims of Srebrenica taking place for the last two decades at the heart of Belgrade’s city center, Republic Square.

The article proposes to interpret the web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a global memory place. After presenting the core elements and basic characteristics of wikis and Wikipedia respectively, the article discusses four related issues of social memory studies: collective memory, communicative and cultural memory, `memory places' and the `floating gap'. In a third step, these theoretical premises are connected to the understanding of discourse as social cognition. Fourth, comparison is made between the potential of the World Wide Web as cyberspace for collective remembrance and the obstacles that stand in its way. On this basis, the article argues that Wikipedia presents a global memory place where memorable elements are negotiated. Its complex processes of discussion and article creation are a model of the discursive fabrication of memory. Thus, they can be viewed and analysed as the transition, the `floating gap' between communicative and collective frames of memory.