Great news: last week our book was published. Memory, Conflict and New Media examines online memory wars in post-Soviet states - where political conflicts take the shape of heated debates about the recent past, and especially World War II and Soviet socialism. More details on the book, including a table of contents, you find on our Routledge book page. We are very happy to see our work in print and thank all contributing authors -- they have done a splendid job and we hope that the book will be of use to a broad array of students, in media and communication studies, area studies, international relations, and many many more fields.

Several of Web Wars' team members partake actively in the spring school Digital Mnemonics in Slavonic Studies, hosted by Alexander Etkind (Cambridge), Polly Jones (Oxford), and Dirk Uffelmann (Passau) at the Bavarian town of Freising. PhD student Mykola Makhortykh is part of a group that explores online Stepan Bandera mythologies with the help of digital tools; researcher Vera Zvereva will give a Skype presentation on 'Conflicting Digital Memories' tomorrow; and project leader Ellen Rutten is presenting an introduction into 'Web Wars and Filter Bubbles: The Dark Sides of Digital Humanities' tomorrow. Have a look at the spring school blog if you are interested: the organizers are doing a great job at sharing their plans, results, and impressions via short summaries, interviews, photographs, and more.

The Web Wars team has been silent for some time, but behind the screens we have actively worked on our book publication, which is now being taken into production by Routledge publishers and whose own web page you find here. The project's core researcher Vera Zvereva has now formally ended her contract, but she is closely involved in the final stages of the book production. Meanwhile, filmmaker Maartje Gerretsen is finalizing her plan for the project documentary about Ukrainian on- and offline memory practices.

Currently, Web Wars members Vera Zvereva and Ellen Rutten are at hotel Solstrand near Bergen, where they join the Future of Russian research collective for this project's last joint workshop. At the workshop,  Zvereva and Rutten will present chapters on social media, online slang, and digital memories for a book on Russian Computer-Mediated Communication. A joint effort of the Future of Russian members and a selection of affiliated scholars, the book presents the first effort to integrate Russian new-media research into international CMC studies.

Now that the Web Wars project is roughly halfway, the team members have started an active circulation of their findings. Apart from several recent talks and (upcoming) article-length-publications -- about which we tweet actively @webwarsproject -- we are working on a book titled Memory, Conflict and Social Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States. The book will come out at Routledge Publishers later this year or in early 2013. Contributors of the volume (which is edited by Julie Fedor, Vera Zvereva, and Ellen Rutten) include memory and media experts Anna Reading and Alexander Etkind; and the various chapters tackle digital commemoration practices in such varying digital media as Wikipedia, Facebook, digital archives, and Twitter. Follow this site for publication-news updates.

Today, we launched a new page on this site: the conference output page, which contains the power points of (most of) the Old Conflicts, New Media conference that the Web Wars team hosted last summer. In January, we will add audio podcasts of the different papers. This page will also be the place to find updates on publications of the conference proceedings -- at the moment, the participants are reworking papers and editing texts which are meant to appear as a joint book publication next year or in 2013, titled Web Wars: Commemorating the Socialist Experience Online (under review at Routledge Publishers and -- Russian version -- the Moscow-based publisher Neprikosnovennyi zapas).

The Web Wars team is having busy weeks:

The program for the Virtual Russia conference - which Web Wars is co-hosting in St. Petersburg together with the Future of Russian team and the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs's Department for Russian and Eurasian Studies - is now online. Participants explore the interrelation between post-Soviet political culture and digital space, from a variety of different disciplinary angles. For the complete program, surf here.  

The Web Wars team looks back on a fruitful project conference. Held last week at Solstrand near Bergen, the Old Conflicts, New Media conference united renowned experts on post-Soviet memory, media, and language. For more details, read team leader Ellen Rutten's blog post on the meeting -- or keep an eye on the academic journals Digital Icons and Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Both will feature conference reports in upcoming issues. In addition, on this site you'll soon find feature podcasts, several Powerpoint presentations and some Slideshows, and photographs. All follow on short term.

Leading experts on post-Soviet online memory are flying into Bergen today and tomorrow for the "Old Conflicts, New Media: Commemorating the Socialist Experience Online" conference, which takes place at Hotel Solstrand from August 31 to September 2. Tackling a variety of geopolitical and media settings (think Georgia, Russia, Rumania, Poland, Ukraine, the Balkans; or Facebook, Vkontakte, chatfora, Wikipedia, Twitter, Livejournal), speakers all rack their brains over one central question: how are memories of the socialist experience mediated digitally? Check our conference page for a final program, which includes talks by such media and memory experts as Anna Reading (London/Sydney), Volodymyr Kulyk (Kyiv), and Alexander Etkind (Cambridge). Paper podcasts will be made available after conclusion of the event on this site.