Talk | Wikipedia, Collective Memory and the Vietnam War

Talk: Wikipedia, Collective Memory and the Vietnam War
with Assoc. Prof. Brendan Luyt
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
College of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences
Nanyang Technological University


Date: Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Time: 7.00pm - 8.30pm
Venue: NUS Museum

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The battle for control of the memory surrounding the Vietnam War rages on, not just in the United States, but the rest of the world as well. One setting for this battle is the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Wikipedia is now an important component of our information infrastructure and as such it plays a role in creating or reflecting collective memory, including that of the Vietnam War. In this talk Professor Luyt will examine Wikipedia’s talk pages on the Vietnam War, showing how this debate participates in these wider conflicts.

This talk is organised in conjunction with the exhibition “Who wants to remember a war?”: War Drawings and Posters from the Ambassador Dato’ N. Parameswaran Collection, which features posters, woodcuts and drawings from the French phase of the Indochina war of resistance against the Americans, and drawings and sketches of life and people at the frontlines. For more information on the exhibition, please visit https://nus.edu/2v2Z7ye.

About the speaker
Brendan Luyt is an Associate Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received both his MLIS and PhD degrees from the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. He also holds a MA in Political Science from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His research focuses broadly on the social and policy landscape of information access. At the present time he is especially interested in the study of the history of information institutions, Wikipedia as a social phenomenon, and issues in scholarly information and communication.

Image: Pham Duc Cuong, Untitled (Underground Communications Centre), Watercolour on paper, 1969. Collection of Ambassador Dato’ N. Parameswaran. Used by permission of Dato’ N. Parameswaran. All rights reserved.