Which ideas do we get from war museums? A computational text analysis of the museums of the Battle of the Ebro (Spanish Civil War)

War museums convey traumatic experiences through complex and contested narratives that shape visitors' perceptions. The Ebro battlefield exemplifies these complexities, with multiple institutions preserving its heritage while presenting differing interpretations. This article employs a Digital Humanities approach to analyse the messages conveyed by these museums. The team digitised exhibition panel texts using OCR technology and applied various textual analysis and data visualisation methods, including word frequency counts and topic modelling. The integration of topic modelling in museum discourse analysis enables the quantification of trends and the identification of overlooked narratives. Results reveal a strong emphasis on the conflict's international dimension and a tendency towards politically equidistant narratives. The analysis also highlights the under-representation of certain groups, particularly civilians, and identifies tensions between museum portrayals of looting and heritage laws. • This article employs computational text analysis combining OCR, topic modelling, and data visualisation. • We examine narratives from six museums on the Battle of the Ebro (1938). • The analysis indicates an under-representation of certain groups –such as the “baby bottle conscription” Republican draft– in the exhibition texts. • Some museums justify –and occasionally romanticise– the looting of war remnants, despite its prohibition under current heritage legislation. • The Ebro museums reflect the material outcomes of heritage legislation, and the political narratives developed over the past 80 years. • There has been a conscious strategy of depoliticising the battle which proved politically useful in times past. • These equidistant views are insufficient in the current context of revisionism and legislative backtracking on historical memory in Spain.