War Sensing through the Telegram Archive of the War: Report about the conference and data sprint (23.- 25.09.2025)

The three-day hybrid event “War Sensing Through the Telegram Archive of the War” consisted of two interconnected parts: a public conference and a semi-public data sprint. The conference brought together around 40 participants, whereas the subsequent semi-public data sprint convened a group of about 20 scholars from various disciplines such as media and communication studies, sociology, engineering, data science and history, as well as practitioners from archival institutions and non-governmental organisations, including human rights monitoring and OSINT groups. 

Rooted in the interdisciplinary focus of the CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation” with its praxeological approach to digital and data-based media, the conference and data sprint, co-organised by the “War Sensing” project (European University Viadrina and the CRC “Media of Cooperation”) and the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History in Lviv) opened up a framework for collaborative knowledge production addressing ethical challenges to work with archived social media data from multidisciplinary experiences. This event format is a continuation of the collaboration between the War Sensing project and the Center for Urban History and builds on the previous data sprint “Memory under Fire” with the Telegram Archive of the War (further: the Archive) organised in 2022 (see Bareikytė et al. 2024). In 2025, the collaboration continued the research on digital platform archives with contemporary questions, while addressing ethical implications of archiving user-generated content, and asking how to collaboratively work with ephemeral and fragile digital data.

As the ongoing Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine is documented not only by institutions but also by civilians who record and share their experiences via digital platforms, Telegram plays a crucial role as a space for coordination, expression, information exchange, and collective sense-making (Nazaruk, 2022). The Archive, curated by the Center for Urban History in Lviv, thus captured a part of the digital dimension of the war. Since February 2022, the Center has been systematically archiving public Telegram channels related to the war, including those used for evacuation, OSINT, mutual aid, memes, infrastructures, or local reporting. The Archive, therefore, offered a unique basis for empirical, inventive and interpretive research into how war is experienced, represented and documented. 

Opening the conversation: Program summary of the events

The conference and data sprint was opened with an event on 22 September in Frankfurt (Oder) by Dr. Susanne Spahn (University of Passau), who presented her book “The Russia Network: How I became a Russia expert and why I can no longer be one today” [Das Russland-Netzwerk: Wie ich zur Russland-Versteherin wurde und warum ich es heute nicht mehr sein kann]. Moderated by Johanna Hiebl (European University Viadrina), the public event engaged a diverse audience of Frankfurt residents and university employees discussing the scale of Russia´s information influence in Germany. A specific focus was laid on how the so-called alternative media in Germany can be used as a mouthpiece for the propagandist narratives of the Russian regime or sabotage recruiting. 

On 23 September, the hybrid conference connected Frankfurt (Oder) and Lviv, with a keynote lecture by the event co-organiser Taras Nazaruk (Center for Urban History) about the context of establishment and curatorial ethics of the Telegram Archive of the War. Nazaruk outlined the ethical and contextual challenges of archiving digital communication from Telegram during the ongoing war. During the evening keynote sessions, Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina) moderated a talk and discussion by Asia Bazdyrieva (University of Applied Arts Vienna) & Svitlana Matviyenko (Simon Fraser University) and a talk and discussion by Daria Hetmanova (Simon Fraser University). Bazdyrieva and Matviyenko outlined their notion of the “Labour of Witnessing” as an often invisible form of experience, examined through feminist and critical theory. They also reflected on how the environment exposes the complexities of war and makes them visible. The public conference concluded with a keynote talk by Daria Hetmanova, who presented her research into mechanisms and practices of detention and filtration on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine with an aim to understand how these detentive environments reproduce and extend through temporal and spatial dimensions.

The public talks were complemented by three tutorials focusing on the practical implementations of doing research with/on Telegram: Sayyara Mammadova (Atlantic Council) presented hands-on insights on how to start investigative processes with Telegram. Kateryna Maikovska (University of Vienna) brought the group into reflective work about doing digital ethnography on Telegram. Guillén Torres Sepulveda (Berkeley Human Rights Center), in his tutorial presented how exposure to sensitive content is not neutral, but can cause emotional and ethical challenges. He also highlighted how the investigator’s own agency influences both the interpretation and practice of doing digital investigations.  

Exploring War Through Data: Summary of the Data Sprint

During the data sprint, we invited scholars, archivists, civic tech and OSINT communities, and civil society actors to work collaboratively with selected datasets from the Telegram Archive of the War. The data sprint participants explored curated datasets by joining one of the following pre-defined research projects: detention and filtration, sabotage, crowd witnessing (cf. Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013) and trustworthiness of OSINT outputs (cf. Digital Method Initiative, 2024). Data sprint is an intensive research method that brings participants from interdisciplinary backgrounds to collectively analyse (digital) data in one space for a limited amount of time. Drawing on the open, experimental ethos of hackathons and barcamps, they foster interdisciplinarity through shared space, hands-on-data methods, and collaborative knowledge production (Venturini, Munk & Meunier, 2016). 

Group 1: Mapping Infrastructures of Filtration through the Telegram Archive of the War

The primary objective of the first group was to identify patterns in how infrastructures of filtration unfold beyond formal governance, focusing on the preparation and normalisation of filtration and detention practices that were discursively supported from the first day of the full-scale invasion. As a subproject of “Occupation Watch” (a CIDER initiative), this project aimed to contextualise and critically examine records issued by the occupiers by analysing Telegram channel messages and comments from pro-Russian sources. 

The group work was guided by the following research question: How do public Telegram communications reflect and document the filtration practices of Russian occupation in Ukraine, such as detention sites, and how these practices evolved over time? One has to remark here that also civilians documented their lived experiences of this control and administrative changes through local resistance, but following a do-no-harm approach for individuals now living under occupation, this data could not be considered during the data sprint. This is why the focus for the analysis was placed on Telegram communication close to narratives of the Russian regime. 

The project group was searching the Telegram Archive within the whole archived period from 28.02.2022 to 31.12.2023 for the keyword of “filtration” in Russian and coding Telegram data directly in the interface of the Archive. This allowed for an analysis of both the conduct of Russian combatants (via posts) and the motivations of the pro-Russian individuals participating in discussions (via comments). The group could trace back how pro-Russian channels portrayed the construction of filtration practices as “cleansing” or “curing” Ukraine of Western influence. This discourse, reinforced by hateful speech and dehumanising narratives, shows how digital communication spaces contributed to the conceptual and psychological infrastructure of violence exposing a horrifying mentality that justified atrocities, war crimes and the war itself.

Group 2: Sabotage on Telegram

The second group aimed to understand how sabotage is narrated in Telegram, and how sabotage is an example of a contemporary form of destabilisation and, especially, resistance during war. Ukrainian citizens and other resistance groups repurposed the platform to organise and deliberate upon the acts of sabotage, demonstrating its role not only as a tool for oppression but also as a tool of resistance to occupation, giving insights into how opposition is organised and sustained under Russian occupation in eastern parts of Ukraine and within Russia itself. 

The group investigated the following research questions: “How do the sabotage groups establish their presence on Telegram: what are their vernacular practices?” and “How is sabotage as a practice and the positionality of the authors are defined and metaphorised?” 

Their work delved into how these channels define and represent sabotage, establish their digital identities, and communicate their objectives to their audiences. Specifically, the group's qualitative approach of in-depth analysis of selected messages focused on understanding how specific sabotage channels established themselves, communicated this establishment, and what topics and activities they talked about in the first months of their establishment. The group narrowed the focus to three anti-Russian public channels and conducted three rounds of open coding on the selected initial posts, developing categories related to positionality, self-reference, framing of actions, functions and narratives of the posts. 

This qualitative approach aimed not for a total representation of the channels' activities but for a deeper understanding of the foundational narratives and operational framing of sabotage-focused Telegram channels and is planned to be further developed in a co-authored academic paper.

Group 3: It has begun. The first hours of the invasion: witnessing the outbreak of the war through urban chats

Telegram platform also served as a chronicle of the war's impact on civilians, documenting their responses during the first hours of the invasion. The third research group focused on how the outbreak and first hours of Russia's full-scale invasion were witnessed and experienced by residents of one city in the eastern part of Ukraine. By analysing public Telegram chats from February 24, 2022, the group investigated the immediate social and informational dynamics of a city under attack. The research questions were the following: “How did the outbreak of the full-scale invasion become witnessable through Telegram?” and “What practices does it allow one to analyse in the context of invasion based on its representation on Telegram?”. The group investigated approximately 7,000 messages from city-based chats using a combination of distant and close reading techniques. For distant reading, the group used web-based text analysis to identify high-frequency words. For close reading, each group member took several keywords for a qualitative analysis and contextualisation. Afterwards, thematic coding revealed the most frequent concerns among residents, including transportation, shelters, medical, telecom, and food supplies, shelling/explosion, civilian harm, among others. The analysis highlighted an overwhelming sense of confusion and uncertainty, as citizens sought answers to urgent, life-critical questions while adapting to rapidly changing conditions, including the access to crucial societal services, including pharmacies, or questions about the potential attacks on civilians by the Russian troops. Despite the chaos, the data also revealed a process of civilian adaptation even during this first day. By the end of the day, alongside persistent uncertainty, messages of gratitude began to appear, directed toward the Ukrainian army and service providers.

At the end of the datasprint the third project group expressed interest in critically assessing the efficacy of methodologies such as distant reading or developing a context-specific glossaries to better interpret the unique linguistic and cultural nuances that have transformed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

Group 4: Evaluation of the trustworthiness of OSINT outputs on Telegram 

This oscillation between confusion and coordination mirrors the broader messiness of the information flux during the war, but also beyond. As communication intensified on social media, a dramatic increase in user-generated content emerged, some of which aimed to clarify this messiness, while others aimed to enlarge the noise. These dynamics of social media, with increased access to publicly shared Open Source Information (OSINF), introduce the need to and challenges in assessing the trustworthiness and authenticity of publicly shared content. 

Building on the Amsterdam Matrix (Digital Methods Initiative, 2024), an analytical framework and its application handbook published by the members of OSINT for Ukraine (Hiebl et al., 2025), the fourth project group aimed to test the Amsterdam Matrix and adapt this framework to Telegram’s specific platform affordances, focusin on two questions: “Which elements of the Amsterdam Matrix are adaptable to Telegram’s architecture?” and “What new parameters should be added to assess OSINT credibility within Telegram’s ecosystem?”. 

By exploratory analysis and collaborative qualitative coding of a small sample dataset of OS(INT)-labelled Telegram messages, the group observed a notable variation in textual and thematic formats of outputs. This led to informed proposals for modifying or replacing certain parameters of the Amsterdam Matrix - originally developed on the basis of posts from Twitter/X - to better suit Telegram's platform affordances. A significant challenge noted by the group was assessing the large volume of low-quality and difficult-to-verify content. As a related side project, the team also explored methods for verifying the integrity of data within the archive to certify if content was altered by computational methods.

These verification challenges exemplify how methodological concerns are inseparable from effective sense-making in a chaotic information environment. Looking forward, this project group anticipates developing educational materials based on these findings and integrating AI into investigative workflows to scale-up and strengthen verification efforts.

A word of thanks from the organisers

The format of the hybrid conference and data sprint around the Telegram Archive provided a space to carry out hands-on-data research, discuss the intersection of different approaches and ethical challenges by drawing on specific thematic and temporal contexts. Beyond the specific findings of each research group, the data sprint surfaced several overarching themes concerning ethical and methodological challenges that came up while collaboratively working with the digital data archived by the Telegram Archive of the War. Participants grappled with issues regarding the research ethics such as anonymisation/pseudonymisation of user data, how to write about distressing and sensitive content from Telegram for a public audience, and navigating further issues, such as ensuring that no harm is caused to data producers, discussing the functionality of the tool and its potential improvements, and the future direction of research.

In times of war in Ukraine and thus in Europe, when ongoing Russia' s bombardment a make collaborative travelling to/from Ukraine and thus research in one place difficult, this hybrid conference and data sprint was a meaningful way to continue to do research despite these circumstances and engage with war-related issues that are pressing for participants from academia and praxis. As organisers of the workshop, we want to thank everyone who joined this workshop for their mutual support and collaboration.

Best regards,

Project “War Sensing” (Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė & Johanna Hiebl) and The Center for Urban History/”Telegram Archive of the War” (Taras Nazaruk)