"Locationally Clear", "Roll Call" and Other Digital Evidences of War
Taras Nazaruk
Center for Urban History25.2.2025, 18:30
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
Why do we need social media archives, and what story can they tell about the Russian-Ukrainian war?
Telegram, Viber, YouTube, or Facebook have become important communication and news dissemination platforms for Ukrainians in the face of Russia's full-scale invasion. For researchers, they will become valuable historical sources about the war. At least those that will be preserved.
It is impossible to imagine our everyday life without social media. Chats about evacuation or volunteer help, chats about cities, towns, and neighborhoods, searching for missing persons, reporting alarms, “arrivals” or queues at the borders-all of these have become an integral part of news feeds and notifications in our smartphones, especially in the first months of the Russian invasion in 2022. But what happens to this data when a platform ceases to be a part of our daily lives? The disappearance of social media is inevitably associated with the loss of a large-scale layer of information about local communities in different parts of the country in particular and society in general. As much as social media have been successfully created for fast and convenient communication, their preservation in archives is equally difficult and problematic.
Today, Ukraine is discussing the threat of anonymous Telegram channels and various forms of banning or restricting this platform due to security risks, illegal practices, or information manipulation. These concerns are related to the fact that social media platforms have become key repositories of data (often sensitive) about the daily lives of millions of people. However, what will happen to thousands of channels and chats when Telegram ceases to be the most popular messenger in Ukraine or ceases to exist altogether? Who will own this data?
Can social media be not only a tool for manipulation and disinformation, but also a source of memory about the Russian-Ukrainian war? What experiences and practices can we track from them and include in our histories? What social media data has become lost or orphaned, or will become so soon? How can such sources be preserved and studied in an ethical and sustainable way?
We will try to discuss these questions on the example of the Telegram Archive of the War, which the Center for Urban History has been working on since February 2022.

Taras Nazaruk
Center for Urban HistoryResearcher, head of Digital History projects at the Center for Urban History. Since August 2016 till July 2024 was coordinating the project “Lviv Interactive“. In 2022, created and headed the “Telegram Archive of the War” documentation project, which is also the subject of his dissertation research at the University of Hagen.
The event will be part of the Center's public program "Source as a Choice," organized by the Center for Urban History in cooperation with EHRI. During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.