Collective Memory and Narrative Cohesion: A Computational Study of Palestinian Refugee Oral Histories in Lebanon

2025-01-23

AI Summary

This study investigates how Palestinian refugees in Lebanon sustain collective memory of the Nakba through oral histories, examining how origin locality, current residence, and gender shape narrative similarity. Drawing on Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory, it employs Sentence-BERT semantic embeddings, pairwise cosine similarity analysis, and topic modeling to quantitatively assess narrative coherence across thematic, geographical, and biographical dimensions. Results demonstrate that origin locality is the strongest predictor of cross-thematic, landmark- and person-related narrative consistency; moreover, the interaction between origin and residence significantly enhances mnemonic cohesion. Gender analysis reveals higher semantic coherence among women in narratives concerning specific historical periods, notably the British Mandate era. The study establishes a reproducible computational framework for collective memory analysis, advancing methodology through scalable, semantics-driven quantification of oral historical data and yielding empirically grounded insights into the socio-spatial structuring of collective memory.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Analogy

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web query analysis, representation and understanding

Abstract

This study uses the Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) to investigate how Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon sustain a cohesive collective memory of the Nakba through shared narratives. Grounded in Halbwachs' theory of group memory, we employ statistical analysis of pairwise similarity of narratives, focusing on the influence of shared gender and location. We use textual representation and semantic embeddings of narratives to represent the interviews themselves. Our analysis demonstrates that shared origin is a powerful determinant of narrative similarity across thematic keywords, landmarks, and significant figures, as well as in semantic embeddings of the narratives. Meanwhile, shared residence fosters cohesion, with its impact significantly amplified when paired with shared origin. Additionally, women's narratives exhibit heightened thematic cohesion, particularly in recounting experiences of the British occupation, underscoring the gendered dimensions of memory formation. This research deepens the understanding of collective memory in diasporic settings, emphasizing the critical role of oral histories in safeguarding Palestinian identity and resisting erasure.

Problem

• Collective Memory
• Oral History
• Cultural Identity

Innovation

• Quantitative Story Similarity
• Collective Memory
• Cultural Identity Preservation