For my proposal, I want to explore amateur history presented on TikTok.
I want to focus specifically on #ForgottenHistory. There is a specific account dedicated to forgotten history, but it is satirical. I am interested in how users use the #ForgottenHistory to spread social awareness. I’m interested in seeing if there is any correlation between when the video was posted and the events occurring at the time. For example, around the time of the Free Palestine Movement, I found a TikTok discussing Muslim aid to Jews during the Holocaust. Not only did the creator tag #ForgottenHistory, but he tagged various #FreePalestine related hashtags as a way to gain more traction.
There is also the interesting use of place present in the videos that are tagged with #ForgottenHistory. A good chunk of the videos are people giving tours of abandoned buildings and giving their historical significance. This is reminiscent of a virtual tour many museums and historic sites offer. One TikTok goes through an Arizona cemetery and links the story of three people interred there.
Hi Carol,
I think you are off to a great start on this project idea. There is a lot of memory work/history making and storytelling happening on TikTok and there has yet to be much if any scholarship exploring how all of that works.
I think focusing on #ForgottenHistory as a tag is a great way to orient and focus a study. If you do delve into this as your project, I think you would likely want to identify some of the most prominent posts with the tag and then use that also to identify users who are posting to it. That way you can tell us about both the kinds of videos that are posted and about the types of users who are posting them.
There are a lot of aspects of the videos you might focus on, so as you wade into the project it would be interesting to see which of those you focus on primarily. Like there is the kinds of moods that the videos set, the extent to which they participate in various TikTok memes, the role that music plays in them, etc. All that is to say that if you went with this as your project you would have a lot of options for how to approach your analysis.
Altogether, this is a solid area to do a research project in and I am sure that if you were to carry it out that you would end up with interesting results.
Best, Trevor