Women's Themes on Ukrainian and Polish Historical YouTube Channels

This article examines the representation of women on Ukrainian and Polish historical YouTube channels, treating YouTube not merely as a platform for popularization but as a major Web 2.0 environment in which historical narratives are produced, circulated, reframed, and made socially meaningful. The study asks how women function in digital historical storytelling: in what roles they appear, whether they are central or secondary figures, in which thematic and chronological contexts they are presented, and which female historical figures attract the greatest attention from viewers. The article is situated at the intersection of digital history, women’s history, memory studies, and platform-based public history. It builds on previous research concerning women’s themes on Polish historical YouTube channels and extends the inquiry through a comparative Ukrainian-Polish perspective. The authors argue that born-digital historical narratives should be studied as historically consequential communicative forms in their own right, not only as derivative popularizations of academic historiography. The empirical core of the study is based on the analysis of leading historical YouTube channels, with particular emphasis on the Ukrainian corpus. For the Ukrainian case, the authors selected 13 channels using two criteria: subscriber base of at least 15,000 and the presence of videos devoted to women in Ukrainian or general history. The resulting dataset included 100 videos published between 2016 and 2024. These materials were annotated through a structured tagging procedure that captured: the scale of women’s presence in a video, their social role, the topic of the film, the geographical-historical frame, the historical period, and the number of views. Methodologically, the article combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. The quantitative component uses descriptive statistics and correspondence analysis in order to identify relationships between the prominence of female figures and other properties of the videos. In addition, the study employs a Decision Tree / CART model to explore which variables are most strongly associated with portraying women as central characters. The qualitative component concerns the interpretation of plot models and recurrent narrative patterns. In this sense, the article is not only about women in history, but also about the digital form of historical narration and the media logic that structures visibility, hierarchy, and audience attention. The findings indicate that women are not absent from contemporary historical YouTube. They appear both as leading protagonists and as supporting figures embedded in narratives centered on male actors. At the same time, their digital representation is shaped by platform dynamics and by the narrative conventions of specific channels. In the Polish case, the article notes that some channels—especially Historia bez cenzury—tend to frame female figures through satire, comedy, and at times stronger sexualization than in the case of male protagonists, which suggests that gendered representation on historical YouTube remains conditioned by the medium’s attention economy and stylistic codes. In the Ukrainian case, the results show that video producers focus primarily on women connected to the history of Ukraine rather than on women in general history. Women are especially visible in political, cultural, and, in some cases, military contexts, while the strongest correlations with central female roles are associated with art and cultural figures, universal-history framing, and high popularity of the video. The study also shows that women linked to the “New Time” period (1789–1914) are particularly prominent within the analyzed corpus. The article further identifies the most visible female figures in the analyzed Ukrainian YouTube material. By views, one of the strongest cases is Helena Blavatsky, whose appeal is interpreted through mystery, occultism, and the attraction of unconventional biography. By frequency of appearance, the most recurrent figures include Roksolana, Anna of Kyiv, and Inhiherda, followed by Lesya Ukrainka, Helena (Motrona), Hanna Zolotarenko, Anna Smokina, and Princess Olga. These patterns show that digital historical culture does not simply reproduce a single canon of famous women; it also reorganizes female visibility according to platform-specific narrative appeal, mnemonic priorities, and audience attention. A broader conclusion of the article is that YouTube has become an important alternative environment for the circulation of historical knowledge and historical imagination. It creates new communicative models that partly break with the patterns of traditional literature and academic narrative forms. For digital historians, this makes platform-native historical content an important archive of contemporary historical consciousness. For gender-oriented research, the article offers empirical material on how women are inserted into, marginalized within, or strategically elevated by digital historical storytelling in Central and Eastern Europe. This record is relevant for researchers working on digital history, women’s history, public history, platform studies, memory studies, YouTube studies, Ukrainian studies, Polish studies, and the history of historical culture in Web 2.0 environments. The article may also be useful for scholars interested in mixed-methods humanities research, especially the combination of content analysis, visual analytics, and exploratory machine learning in the study of born-digital historical discourse. Funding:This work was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) under the research project Historical narratives in Web 2.0 as a functional element of national identities in Central and Eastern Europe, no. UMO-2020/39/B/HS3/01237.