Interest in Historical Figures on the World Wide Web as a Marker of Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Ukraine

Abstract

The purpose of the article – to determine the specifics and intensity of interest in M. Hrushevskyi from 2004 to 2022 based on statistical data from the Google search engine. The research methodology. Analysis using computer-assisted methods was performed on two types of data: time series (quantitative data) and sets of keywords (qualitative-textual data). The methods used to examine the time series were: analysis of the central tendency in the whole set and in the set divided into individual periods; extraction of the main trend from the time series by sifting out seasonal and random components using the Hodrick Prescott filter. Computational linguistics methods were used to analyse sets of keywords (text data): a linguistic corpus was created based on the set of keywords, from which words with only grammatical meaning were removed. A table of the frequency of occurrence of specific words individually as well as the frequency of associations between words was then drawn up. The scientific novelty of the study consists in clarifying the peculiarities of M. Hrushevskyi’s reception in cyberspace, manifested in the frequency of searching for information about him using the popular Google search engine, as well as Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia. Conclusions. At the end of our research, we conclude that M. Hrushevskyi appears to be a well-known and important figure to Ukrainian users, but on the contrary, does not generate much interest amongst Internet users from other countries. As we can see from the acquired results, search queries concerning M. Hrushevskyi are mainly dominated by scientific and didactic topics. Therefore, a certain working hypothesis can be derived in that the discourse dealing with M. Hrushevskyi is not noticeably politicized, as might be expected given his dizzying career during the revolutionary years. Instead, the discourse relates more to education, cultural heritage research, memory and history. The obtained data will be useful primarily to sociologists working on establishing the attitude change dynamics of Ukrainians towards our most famous historical figures.