Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki & Tanja Vahtikari, eds, Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021
This chapter shows how nationally framed war experiences occupied and shaped Finnish dreams durin... more This chapter shows how nationally framed war experiences occupied and shaped Finnish dreams during and after World War II. By studying written dream reminiscences from the 1980s and a war veteran survey from 1999 to 2000, Kivimäki analyzes how the war nationalized the most private spheres of life. Civilians’ war dreams were more symbolic than those of soldiers, which were characterized rather by a relentless reenactment of traumatic experiences. War-related dreams had an impact on people’s nightlife long after the war was over. Yet the frequency and content of war-related dreams changed over time, and sometimes the dreams themselves could become a site of relief from recurrent nightmares.
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While computational approaches to mining emotions have been common in fields like computer science and linguistics, they have not gained wider popularity in historical research. Pioneering attempts have been based on individual emotion words carefully chosen by an historian, or on readily available, more generic emotion lexicons. Compared to machinelearning solutions, lexicon-based approaches require less computational effort and are more transparent to interpret. Our methodology combines the ready-made word list FEIL with contextual knowledge of historians. FEIL gives around 7,000 Finnish words an emotion category and intensity ratings. First, the emotion lexicon was filtered based on high intensity. Then the domain expert manually removed words not particularly emotionally intensive in the context of war letters. The expert also annotated the list of the most frequent words in the war letter collection and handpicked emotionally intensive words not included in FEIL. Our final list covered 298 emotion words. We quantified changes in their use over time.
In contrast to earlier research, our analysis indicates that soldiers' and civilians' emotionality did not significantly differ during World War II. Soldiers' use of emotion words saw a decline in the last stages of the war, but overall their letters were almost as emotional as the civilians' letters. We did indeed identify some changes in the individual emotion words used by the soldiers in their letters: patriotic words in particular decreased in the course of the war. In addition to empirical findings, our paper sheds light on the problem of universal emotion lexicons in historical research: linguistic, cultural and temporal differences between present-day lexicons and historical datasets can lead to biased interpretations. Thus, our paper contributes not only to the history of emotions but also to emotion mining, which is historically sensitive.
In the rearview mirror of history, the first half of the twentieth century stands out as the heyday of European nationalism and totalitarianism. The age of the world wars, when whole age cohorts of young men were sent to annihilate each other and die for their country, now seems distant. Yet clearly this potential for aggressive violence and altruistic sacrifice does not entirely belong to the past; the cult of war heroism may have lost its topical relevance for defining male citizenship, but it has not lost its appeal altogether. A look at the plethora of war movies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the idolization of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (1928–1967), the celebration of national anniversaries, or the cult of martyrdom in terrorist organizations reveals the continuous attraction of linking heroic masculinity with armed struggle—and contemporary professional armies still emphasize heroic role models in motivating the ranks. The changing content and varying forms of military heroes and heroism reflect historical changes and power balances, but the study of war heroism—as well as its frictions and failures—always remains a study of more wide-ranging collective identities, self-images, and gender politics, regardless of the era.
While computational approaches to mining emotions have been common in fields like computer science and linguistics, they have not gained wider popularity in historical research. Pioneering attempts have been based on individual emotion words carefully chosen by an historian, or on readily available, more generic emotion lexicons. Compared to machinelearning solutions, lexicon-based approaches require less computational effort and are more transparent to interpret. Our methodology combines the ready-made word list FEIL with contextual knowledge of historians. FEIL gives around 7,000 Finnish words an emotion category and intensity ratings. First, the emotion lexicon was filtered based on high intensity. Then the domain expert manually removed words not particularly emotionally intensive in the context of war letters. The expert also annotated the list of the most frequent words in the war letter collection and handpicked emotionally intensive words not included in FEIL. Our final list covered 298 emotion words. We quantified changes in their use over time.
In contrast to earlier research, our analysis indicates that soldiers' and civilians' emotionality did not significantly differ during World War II. Soldiers' use of emotion words saw a decline in the last stages of the war, but overall their letters were almost as emotional as the civilians' letters. We did indeed identify some changes in the individual emotion words used by the soldiers in their letters: patriotic words in particular decreased in the course of the war. In addition to empirical findings, our paper sheds light on the problem of universal emotion lexicons in historical research: linguistic, cultural and temporal differences between present-day lexicons and historical datasets can lead to biased interpretations. Thus, our paper contributes not only to the history of emotions but also to emotion mining, which is historically sensitive.
In the rearview mirror of history, the first half of the twentieth century stands out as the heyday of European nationalism and totalitarianism. The age of the world wars, when whole age cohorts of young men were sent to annihilate each other and die for their country, now seems distant. Yet clearly this potential for aggressive violence and altruistic sacrifice does not entirely belong to the past; the cult of war heroism may have lost its topical relevance for defining male citizenship, but it has not lost its appeal altogether. A look at the plethora of war movies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the idolization of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (1928–1967), the celebration of national anniversaries, or the cult of martyrdom in terrorist organizations reveals the continuous attraction of linking heroic masculinity with armed struggle—and contemporary professional armies still emphasize heroic role models in motivating the ranks. The changing content and varying forms of military heroes and heroism reflect historical changes and power balances, but the study of war heroism—as well as its frictions and failures—always remains a study of more wide-ranging collective identities, self-images, and gender politics, regardless of the era.