Telegram Archive of the War

Center for Urban History

Прочитати сторінку українською можна за  цим посиланням .

[This page was created at the beginning of the emergency archiving initiative Telegram Archive of the War. The information on it is outdated. For up-to-date information, please follow the link  telegram.lvivcenter.org ]

We document how Ukrainians learn, live, and share testimonies about the war through Telegram.

This emergency archiving aims to collect and organize information flows that may quickly disappear due to their short-lived digital nature.

We are preparing an archive that will help us talk about war when we can talk about it in the past tense.

Questions and Answers

What is the Telegram archive of the war?

We document how Ukrainians learn, live, and share testimonies about the war on Telegram. We store on our servers streams of messages and audiovisual content from mainly Ukrainian channels and chats published since February 24, 2022. After processing and structuring the materials, an archival collection about the war will be created and published.

Why Telegram?

Because with the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Telegram gained popularity as a communication and information platform in Ukrainian society. Despite a number of other common social networks, we decided to focus on the Telegram, in view of the sharp increase in its use after February, 24. For example, the official channel of Volodymyr Zelenskyi has grown from about 65,000 (24.02) subscribers to 1.5 million (10.03). Some channels and chats were created in connection with the war.  The number of downloads  of the Telegram app has increased significantly. Posts from other social media, mass media and authorities are actively shared on Telegram, implying the broad representativeness of the information landscape.

It makes the Ukrainian segment distinct from the peculiarities of other countries, where this platform is mainly taken as a space for sharing conspiracy theories and communication for the extreme right ( Netherlands ,  USA ,  Germany ). In Ukraine, Telegram is used for much broader goals. A series of testimonies collected by journalists ( NPR ,  The Record ,  The New York Times ,  Time ,  Wired ,  The Conversation ) also show its popularity. A study of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology commissioned by OPORA  shows  that in the first two months of the war, 76.6% of Ukrainians turned to social media for news, and Telegram was the most popular of them (65.7%).

The use of Telegram chats for operational coordination of actions allows documenting horizontal communication in professional environments and communities. The documentary and the historical value of archiving such chats, can be evidenced by the BBC's Ukraine  report  about the horror of being under occupation in Butcha.

What does the archive include?

It includes almost everything (although, of course, not everything). The range of archived channels and chats is extensive: local and all-Ukrainian volunteer groups for the coordination of humanitarian assistance, evacuation chats, housing search, reporting on missing persons, reporting about air-raid alerts, urban channels and local problems in the areas of hostilities and the occupied territories, personal diaries, blogs and artistic reflections, humour and memes, expert analytics, documenting the course of hostilities and destruction, political communities, messages of local and central authorities, armed forces, media, as well as Russian government propaganda and pro-Russian channels and chats.

 Local groups and channels talk about how the war is experienced in different communities across the country. Depending on the intensity of hostilities, the problems of people on the ground can vary - from food, medicines and evacuation to problems with the water pipeline or the movement of Russian military equipment.

The Telegram not only reflects the course of the war — but there are also ongoing hostilities waging here. From the first days of the invasion, a chatbot was created on this platform to inform the Armed Forces about Russian military positions. In addition, Belarusian activists regularly monitor the actions of the Russian military in Belarus and report air attacks on Ukraine. On the other hand, Telegram is actively used for information and propaganda campaigns, as well as for the coordination of cyberattacks and the publication of acquired databases and personal information.

Our archive records all text and voice messages, images, audio, video and other types of files. We are already archiving around 2500 channels and chats. The total amount of data reaches about fifteen terabytes and grows.

Despite the broad framework, our focus areas do change. We stopped archiving some channels and assigned low archiving priority to others. We keep adding new thematic focuses. The main emphasis is on local and industry-specific channels and chats that allow you to see the information landscape from the residents' perspective and go beyond the understanding of war as armed hostilities or official and journalistic messages only.

The following thematic collections have been shaped: 

1. Official and News Channels 2. Urban and Local 3. Border Crossings 4. Refugees 5. IDPs 6. Volunteer Chats 7. Medical and Psychological Assistance 8. Military Units 9. Military / Political Blogs 10. Military Mobilisation 11. Military Mobilisation in ORDLO 12. Partial Mobilisation in russia 13. IT Community/ Information and Cyber Attacks 14. Databases and Indexes 15. OSINT/ Analytics 16. Infrastructure 17. Personal Blogs / War Diaries / Artistic Reflections 18. Russian Propaganda and Fakes 19. Occupied Territories 20. Russian Volunteer Aid 21. Russian Bordering Regions 22. Belarus 23. Economy 24. Agriculture 25. Food and Gastronomy 26. Digital Marketing and Media 27. War and Gender 28. Culture 29. Religion 30. Children 31. Education 32. Sport 33. Humour 34. Law 35. People with Disabilities 36. Ecology, Animal Rescue 37. Foreign Channels/Chats about the War

At the same time, we are aware of our limitations and the inability to create a universal archive that will cover all aspects of our wartime reality. So, we focus on the topics and use the approaches that are accessible to us given our experience, professional lens, and understanding of context.

How did it all start?

Since the beginning of the war, we've all been trying to figure out how we can be useful. First of all, these were security and humanitarian projects, where the Center for Urban History, as an institution, and our employees, individually, began to participate (creating a  shelter  for people in need, and launching  fellowships  for researchers). Subsequently, the question arose as to how we also could be of use in professional terms. This prompted us to launch several initiatives to document the war, which spilt into four tracks — visual materials, oral testimonies, personal diaries, and web archiving (find more about all these initiatives  here ). First, we started to store websites of various local media and initiatives. However, we quickly realized that one of the most intensely saturated platforms was Telegram. After consulting several web archivists, we realized that researchers and archivists did not place enough focus on these feeds. First, we decided to focus on documenting channels broadly related to information wars and cyberwarfare. Subsequently, the project began to expand with new topics. With the advent of greater server capacity and financial support, others have joined the effort. Therefore, each of the archive groups follows a specific topic or region.

How are these materials collected?

We use the option to save the channel and chat history  provided  by Telegram itself. A group of several people regularly check the updates in each of the channels and save them on our servers in stages. All materials are collected as HTML format. You can open it in any browser as a regular news feed. It could also be converted to a WARC web archive format.

This is the interface of exporting data from Telegram

In the future, we plan to create a database and an emulator Telegram for cross-cutting viewing the entire archive. We also want to map archived channels to more clearly trace their connections in a network of Telegram channels.

What about ethical and legal issues?

We do not archive private or hyper-local chats (private correspondence, chats of residential buildings, condominiums, etc.) — only public channels and groups you can freely join. To the best of our knowledge, the preservation and arrangement of these materials for archiving purposes  do not violate copyright laws  or  Telegram's privacy policy .

However, we are concerned about these saved materials' legal and ethical issues. Therefore, the archive will not be available until we have prepared an appropriate protocol on copyright, personal data, display of cruelty and violence, and rules for using the archive. Please  contact us  if you have experience in this area and can offer methodological support.

Here are some of our thoughts on this: 

  1. First of all, we want to exclude the possibility of any further use of the archive to obtain personal identifiable information. In addition, we are committed to identifying and appropriately labelling content that includes scenes of violence, victims of war crimes, and remains of humans and animals.
  2. Once we have the right policy in place, we plan to inform administrators and members of archived channels and chats about our initiative and agree on the possibility of using it. We will also create the option to remove materials from archive collections at any time in the future.
  3. Access by third parties to the archive (or parts of it) will be possible only after prior registration and outlining the intentions of its use.

What’s next?

We divided the work on this archive into several stages: capture, structure and access, and interpretation.

As the channels disappear (some of them do not exist any longer) and social networks are inherently fragile and ephemeral, our priority today is emergency archiving — responsive preservation of information flows about the war that we can see.

The next stage includes processing — a structured description of available materials, the preparation of metadata, the preparation of ethical and legal protocols for working with the archive, and the preparation of a report on the process itself and the context of archiving. To do this, we plan a series of  methodological seminars  with experts in the field of digital archives, web archiving, social media researchers, etc. During these conversations, we hope to develop a clearer understanding of all the risks and benefits of publishing this archive. You can follow the latest updates on the  Center for Urban History  website.

In the third stage of our work, we want to prepare an infrastructure for working with the archive and, possibly, a Telegram emulator interface that will allow third parties to access the materials and work independently. This archive dimension should help bring the person closer to the context where the channel content was created. In addition, we are considering the possibility of analyzing and visualizing the collected data. We might prepare API access or open datasets for this purpose.

 In addition, we want to start a conversation with researchers from a wide range of disciplines about the possibilities of analyzing and interpreting the material collected in this archive. We are interested in organizing a series of events where we will be able to present the context of the creation of the archive about its content, as well as discuss the areas of research from the perspective of several social and humanitarian disciplines, as well as artistic practices.

However, the first attempts to analyze and interpret the Telegram archives are already emerging. For example, one of the participants of our archival group, together with students of the University of Amsterdam, participated in the so-called data sprint, when they collected and processed the dissemination of Russian propaganda on Telegram. The results of their work can be viewed in the blog of the  Institute of Network Cultures . Although the project was not based directly on our archive materials, it offers a useful research methodology for us on how to work with Telegram channels.

How do I access it?

So far, access is in no way possible, given  ethical and legal issues , and because of the  workflow  of creating the archive. Today, the priority is to collect the materials on our servers. When the archive becomes available, we will notify it additionally. 

How can I help?

First of all, we are interested in discussing the methodology of archiving the web, social networks and, in particular, Telegram. To do this, we organized  a series of workshops  with the University of Bern on the digital archiving of crisis events. If you would like to participate in this discussion, please  contact us  or participate in our events.

You can also send us links to Telegram channels that you think are worth archiving. First of all, we are interested in local and industry-specific chats and channels that tell us about the developments in the city where you are staying at the moment or within the environment you are communicating.

You can read more about other options about how to help the Center for Urban History initiatives  here .

Participants

All participants in this archival project, except for the Center for Urban History employees, come from previously occupied territories or were forced to leave their homes with the onset of a full-scale Russian invasion. Their professional background is in historical disciplines, journalism, and media communications. For security reasons, we decided not to disclose any more details about them this time.

Partners and Support

Project is supported by the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe (University of St. Gallen)

We are grateful to Niels Brügger (Aarhus University, NetLab), Anders Klindt Myrvoll (Netarkivet), Olga Hołownia and members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, Marcin Wilkowski (Centrum Kompetencji Cyfrowych UW), Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures) Marc Tuters, Stijn Peeters (Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam), Maciej Maryl (Centrum Humanistyki Cyfrowej Instytutu Badań Literackich PAN), Maria Drabczyk (Centrum Cyfrowe), Ad Pollé (Europeana), Migle Bareikyte, Tatjana Seitz, Yarden Skop (Universität Siegen), Valerie Schafer, Lars Wieneke (C2DH, University of Luxembourg), Anton Mischuk, Mykola Makhortykh (University of Bern), Oleksiy Chebotarov (Center for Governance and Culture in Europe, University of St. Gallen; New Europe College; Center for Urban History) for valuable direct and indirect advice, guidance, and consulting.

Financial support: Center for Governance and Culture in Europe (University of St. Gallen), NEP4DISSENT, Körber Stiftung.

Infrastructure support and advisory: Save the Ukraine Monuments (4CH Project), Amazon Web Services, Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam)

Publications:

Talks and Presentations:

Digital Archiving Workshop Series:

Launched by the University of Bern in cooperation with the Center for Urban History and the University of Zurich in June-July 2022 (please follow  the link  for more details).

Digital History Seminars:

This year's edition of Digital History Seminars by the Center for Urban History and the Center for Governance and Culture at the University of St. Gallen is organized as a series of events to share and collectively discuss digital archiving efforts that emerged as a response to various crisis events in Ukraine and globally (please follow  the link  for more details).

James Smithies, Paul Millar Documenting Disasters: Making Archives and Producing History Through Community Engagement

Mariia Tsypiashchuk War Archive: DocuDays

Contact Us

If you'd like to receive the updates, please, subscribe to the newsletter of the  Center for Urban History . 

Project Coordinator: Taras Nazaruk, t.nazaruk@lvivcenter.org.ua

This is the interface of exporting data from Telegram

Project is supported by the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe (University of St. Gallen)