The narratives of war (NoW) corpus of written testimonies of the Russia-Ukraine war

Documentation and analysis of psychological states experienced by witnesses and survivors of catastrophic events is a critical concern of psychological research. This paper introduces the new corpus of written testimonies collected from nearly 1500 Ukrainian civilians from May 2022–January 2024, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The texts are available in the original Ukrainian and the English translation. The Narratives of War (NoW) corpus additionally contains demographic and geographic data on respondents, as well as their scores in tests of PTSD symptoms and moral injury. The paper provides a detailed introduction into the method of data collection and corpus structure. It also reports a quantitative frequency-based “keyness” analysis that identifies words particularly representative of the NoW corpus, as compared to the reference corpus of Ukrainian texts that predates the war with Russia. These key words shed light on the psychological state of witnesses of war. With its materials collected during the ongoing war, the corpus contributes to the body of knowledge for studies of the psychological impact of war and trauma on civilian populations.