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Paul Robeson’s place in YouTube: A social spatial network analysis of digital heritage

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This article utilizes the African American Paul Robeson and his representation on YouTube to address three critical and underexplored arenas in heritage studies. First, Paul Robeson is an individual all but lost in the public memory of the USA, despite having been one of the USA’s most well-known celebrities. This article presents, for the first time, a global analysis of his representation and presence through the medium of YouTube. Second, in only a limited number of studies has YouTube been utilized to analyze memorialization and heritage; this article solidifies, channels, and expands upon those techniques. Finally, this article presents a spatial component to the otherwise nonspatial technique of analyzing YouTube social networks, presenting specific spatial data, which can be mapped and analyzed. Utilizing values of connectedness among videos of different topical clusters, as well as audience reactions to videos of a specific topic or place, allows for a deeper and broader understanding of both how Paul Robeson is memorialized and represented globally and how YouTube is an essential tool in social spatial heritage studies.
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... In the National Waterfront Museum in Wales, most visitors approach Robeson as a musician first and foremost, perhaps due to a less-than-robust bio, describing him as an "actor and singer who became a role model for oppressed people across the world," but also due to their prior knowledge of him (Rhodes, 2021, p. 772 ). Likewise, Paul Robeson's presence on YouTube similarly skewsat nearly a 2:1 ratio-towards music, with "Ol' Man River" and the Soviet National Anthem being the two most viewed videos at time of publication (Rhodes, 2019). ...
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Paul Robeson's global memorialization poorly represents the extent to which the famous African American activist, actor, athlete, singer, and scholar impacted international culture and politics. Robeson's memorials, while few and far between, particularly in the United States, reside primarily within college campuses and theatrical and musical productions, alongside a few more traditional plaques, works of public art, and his own work. While there has been some interest in these various memorials, commemorations, and works of Robeson, no one has yet explored one of the most widespread and historically loaded aspects of his commemoration: the Paul Robeson Tomato. This heirloom tomato, developed in the Soviet Union, has, as one seed website states, "a cult following." Reading through various gardening and seed websites, we find that the tomato has a special place among heirlooms. At the same time, the digital and print networks conveying information about the tomato and Paul Robeson silence and twist Robeson's memorialization given political, cultural, and ecological contexts. This leads us to ask a number of questions, particularly how we might understand this tomato within the broader memory and memorialization of Paul Robeson? How does this human-environment interaction of more-than-human memory impact Robeson's legacy? And how can we further think of living memory beyond human experience to the remainder of the natural landscape around us and the power it has? This project explores these notions of living memory, more-than-human, and memorialization in the context of the histories which envelop Paul Robeson and the tomato.
... Users can connect with other men and women within seconds, share their ideas, and give comments by video conferencing. Social media hyperlinks of the persons are showing unique documentaries (Rhodes, 2018). Men and women additionally use social media to get information about different countries. ...
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... Edensor 1997; Rhodes 2017) and "virtual memorial landscapes" (i.e. Knudsen and Stage 2013;Rhodes 2018: 3) contextualize these digital landscapes within memory studies. ...
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