History and YouTube. Historical Narrative in the Age of Web 2.0

The article presents the results of an interdisciplinary study on Polish YouTube channels devoted to history, analysing the dynamics of historical storytelling in the Web 2.0 environment. Drawing upon a corpus of 635 videos from six channels (2013–2019), the authors—Wiktor Werner, Adrian Trzoss, and Dawid Gralik—combine quantitative data mining (Python-based algorithms, clustering, and tagging) with qualitative narratological analysis.

The study shows that Polish YouTube history channels predominantly favour political and military narratives, while the 20th century remains the dominant historical era in popular memory. The research also identifies the rise of edutainment—a hybrid model of knowledge popularisation that merges education and entertainment—and examines its implications for the deprofessionalisation of historical discourse.

By linking computational analysis with theories of narrative and cultural memory (Rüsen, White, Lorenz), the paper contributes to understanding how algorithmic visibility, community participation, and network culture reshape historical consciousness in Poland.