It has always been a challenge for researchers to capture 'collective memory'. As Holocaust memory becomes more digital, this aim becomes even harder. Here, our Lab Director, Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, introduces the approach we've adopted in designing a methodology to record content for our groundbreaking 'living database-archive'.
by Austin Xie, International Junior Research Associate, The University of Chicago Austin Xie is spending two months with us here at the Landecker Digital Memory Lab as part of the University of Sussex’s International Junior Research Associates (IJRA) programme. Here, in the first of two blogs, he tells us about himself and his plans. I’ve loved games my whole life. In elementary school, that meant the imagination games I played with friends and our own innovation of freeze tag (’freeze or tag’ — freeze everyone, or pass it on). In middle and high school, it became the video games we played and those we fantasized about designing. So later, at the University of Chicago, it was a magical moment for me to see and take Critical Videogame Studies as part of my English major—and shortly after, cross-listing it with my newly declared second major: Media Arts and Design (MAAD), with a ‘cluster focus’ in games. That same kind of magic manifested in my eyes during my first Zoom meeting with Dr. Victoria Grace Walden, here at University of Sussex in the Landecker Digital Memory Lab, when she said I could work with games. She noticed that ‘look’ instantly. That magic comes from the things [...]
by Dr Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden As more Holocaust institutions feel emboldened to incorporate digital media into their practices, it is increasingly urgent that there are clear guidelines to help shape their thinking. In response to this urgency, the new Landecker Digital Memory Lab has arrived and begins by publishing the final two recommendation reports of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project's previous work. They offer guidelines for a more sustainable approach to using virtual and augmented reality, and computer games for Holocaust memory and education. The latest reports mark the completion of the set, which broadly looked at digital interventions in Holocaust memory and education (read the other recommendations here, which cover AI and machine learning, digitising material evidence, social media and digitally recording, recirculating and remixing Holocaust testimony). The reports ask provocative questions of those responsible for the future of Holocaust memory: major tech companies, policymakers, academia, and Holocaust museums, memorials and archives. Key recommendations from the two latest reports, ‘Virtualising Holocaust Memoryscapes’ and ‘Gaming and Play’ include: conduct thorough research into the impact of digital Holocaust projects establish technology working groups to help propel development in this field create spaces to share knowledge and ideas provide training and support [...]
The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Foreword Digital games are becoming increasingly significant within Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies. The so-called Holocaust gaming taboo (Kansteiner 2017) which has burdened both the mainstream gaming industry and small indie studios seems to show signs of lifting. Scholars have pointed out that major FPS (first-person shooter) franchises such as Wolfenstein and Call of Duty have only teetered on representation of this past, often taking liberty with Nazi themes while placing the Holocaust within the margins or completely eliding the persecution of European Jewry altogether (Hayton 2015; Chapman and Linderoth 2015; Marrison 2020; van dan heede 2023). At the other end of the spectrum, game designers working with small- budget proposals had been “promptly pressured to abandon the project” (Kansteiner 2017, p.111-112) due to the backlash in public discourse, often prompted by professional Holocaust organisations denouncing the very premise of Holocaust games. However, the rising prominence of indie studios such as Paintbucket Games responsible for [...]
The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Foreword Virtual reality and augmented reality experiences play an increasingly significant role in Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies into visitor and user experience. There is a rapidly expanding list of projects experimenting with cinematic virtual reality, photogrammetry, digital mapping, 3D modelling, 360-degree on-location survivor testimony as well as a growing portfolio of augmented and mixed reality mobile and tablet applications. Principally being implemented as spatial technologies, several memorial sites and museums are exploring the possibilities of creating 3D graphic reconstructions of former sites of Nazi persecution in AR/VR such as the digital reconstruction of Falstad Concentration Camp, the Here: Spaces for Memory App at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site, the Sobibor AR exhibit, the project Auschwitz VR as well as the 360-degrees-walks at Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Going further, some digital initiatives are using VR/AR/MR technologies to zoom in on historical documents, testimonies and artefacts, notable projects include the ARt AR App at the Dachau Memorial [...]
Dr Victoria Grace Walden and Dr Kate Marrison of the Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Sussex will be joined by an expanded team from the summer of 2024 to launch a new 5-year project funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation. Awarded 4,100,000 Euros, Dr Walden will lead the Landecker Digital Memory Lab: Connective Holocaust Commemoration which is dedicated to enhancing the sustainability of digital Holocaust memory. The lab will sit across both the Weidenfeld Institute and the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, benefiting from the rich research culture of both. Alongside the production of original research, the Lab’s activities will include: the development of a ‘living database-archive’, which will preserve recordings of digital projects dedicated to Holocaust memory complemented by interviews with professionals involved in their development and use at Holocaust sites (from programmers and designers to curators and educators). The ‘living database’ aims to help Holocaust memory and education institutions across the world learn from historical digital practice by providing the first database and archive of digital works in this field. a new online publishing space dedicated to digital Holocaust memory with an international editorial board designed to promote interdisciplinary and inter-sector dialogues across digital spaces. a [...]
Abstract In our chapter, we investigate how the Covid-19 restrictions affected the translation of in-person commemorative ceremonies into online-only events. Whilst the majority of existing research has a relatively small scale, we have turned to the larger scope of social media data to examine wider online memory culture. To do so, we conduct comparative analysis of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram data from institutions organising commemorative events for the liberation of Neuengamme, the massacre at Srebrenica, and the liberation of Beau Bassin together with non-institutional posts using the hashtags from these institutions. Through this analysis, we aim to answer our main research questions: how do the online discourses by institutions and the wider public compare in relation to posts using shared hashtags during major commemoration periods during Covid-19 lockdowns? To what extent did the move to remote engagement during the pandemic reconfigure the so-called bifurcation of memory culture, between institutional and popular memory discourse (Hoskins, 2014) in any way that might suggest that the lockdowns evidence a change in commemoration practices? Our findings demonstrate that despite the major anniversaries marked in 2020, related memory institutions had little impact on social media, and their commemorative approaches in these spheres were not transformed [...]
Published in Eastern European Holocaust Studies Introduction I recently commented on the international furore provoked by the plans Moscow filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky leaked in May 2020 for the renovation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre.[1] In its critique, The New York Times[2] states that a computer algorithm designed to create a personalised museum experience would assign visitors the roles of executioner, collaborator, or victim: donning a VR headset, they would be placed into the historical scenes of the massacre with the use of deep fake technology. The media storm that erupted after this leak led to Khrzhanovsky’s plans being dropped. Putting the controversy aside, Khrzhanovsky’s proposal was nevertheless ambitious in foregrounding the symbiotic relationship between computational and human agency in digital environments, which is an affordance of contemporary technologies rarely emphasised in Holocaust museums and memorial sites’ digital projects. One of the issues often neglected when we pose the questions “is digitalisation a blessing or a curse for Holocaust memorialisation?”, is that digital interventions are not entirely automated and out of human control; rather they are an entanglement between computational and human logics and materialities.[3] To put this more bluntly, whether digitalization of Holocaust memorialisation is a blessing or a [...]
The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Foreword Holocaust collections are becoming increasingly digitised. Whilst digitisation offers many opportunities, especially in terms of preservation and public access to material evidence of this past, it nevertheless also introduces new challenges for Holocaust heritage. Digital technologies offer the potential for more networked connections between institutions, this is not always easy. There is a lack of consistency in vocabularies used for metadata, national and supranational laws affecting digital dissemination differ across the world, and there is unevenness across the sector in terms of resources (time, technological, and human) that can be dedicated to digitisation projects, and digital literacies and capacities. Despite the public misconception that 'the Nazis left little evidence of their crimes', there are large swathes of historical documents and objects that testify to the violences enacted during the Holocaust. The Arolsen Archives, alone, has more than 50 million reference cards and 30 million documents from concentration and forced labour camps, and files on displaced persons. Beyond contemporary evidence of the Holocaust, there are substantial collections [...]
The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Forward The majority of academic research that offers commentary on digital Holocaust projects tends to focus on what is seen by users at the interface. For example, the simulation of human-to-human dialogue in interactive biography projects or avatars in Second Life. Far less attention has been given to the invisible processes that inform what data is retrieved by the user. Artificial intelligence and machine learning already impact Holocaust education and memory, although their influence is more predominant in public online spaces - such as search engines - than within the work of professional institutions dedicated to teaching about and commemorating this past. How might Holocaust organisations harness the possibilities of these technologies for 'good'? What challenges do they need to navigate to achieve this? What support do they need, and from whom, to manage this substantial task? Holocaust education and memory developed within and alongside the so-called broadcast era of seemingly fixed, closed texts. Once a novel is published or a film released, the production process is [...]
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Landecker Digital Memory Lab
University of Sussex
Falmer Campus
Brighton and Hove
East Sussex
BN1 9RH
LandeckerDigitalMemoryLab@sussex.ac.uk
Contact
Landecker Digital Memory Lab
University of Sussex
Falmer Campus
Brighton and Hove
East Sussex
BN1 9RH
LandeckerDigitalMemoryLab@sussex.ac.uk
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