Gathering the Voices

Behind the Scenes at the Lab
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Behind the Scenes at the Lab

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Behind the Scenes at the Lab

This quarter, we’ve launched a global survey of digital Holocaust memory, continue work on our database, published on AI and Collective Memory, developed digital humanities skills, hosted a Holocaust Education visiting fellow, continued working on our digital memory database, and much more. Take a look at what the Lab has achieved over the last few months. Since the Summer, the team’s main focus has been on the development of the Digital Memory Database following its beta launch at our inaugural Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo 2025. The resource aims to be a ‘living’ collection of global digital Holocaust memory practice from the 1990s into the future containing curatorial and collaborative tools. Database test session. Credit: Dr. Ben Pelling. In close collaboration with Research Software Engineer, James Alvarez and the design team at Chimney, the development of this flagship resource has been based on rigorous user testing sessions led by the Lab’s Research team. Work on the database has included: Writing methodologies Developing materials to guide users Transcription checking Indexing Software development Design Functionality testing (as well as user-testing) Quality assurance checks Preparation of digital assets September In September, when the BBC ran an article about spammers profiting from AI [...]

By Mel Poluck|2025-11-27T23:16:15+00:0027 November 2025|

Spotlight: Gathering the Voices

by Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Our Spotlight series takes a deep dive into the digital offerings of worldwide organisations dedicated to Holocaust memory. This week, Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden looks at how the community association Gathering the Voices has used digital media to present testimonies of survivors with connections to Scotland, and to enable students to learn about their experiences. As their first digital comic details, Gathering the Voices is a community association with six trustees, based in the Glasgow area. The trustees are three married couples, and the husband of each had at least one parent who experienced the Holocaust. It is a personal project, and the trustees have been able to collect c. 50 interviews because they had developed a substantial level of trust with many interviewees before the project started. It was initially established with a small grant from Sense Over Sectarianism and a gift of several audio recorders that were going to be thrown out by Glasgow Caledonian University (where one of the trustees worked). Since then, the trustees have done immense work to apply for further funding, receiving support from the Heritage Fund which needed to be matched. Nevertheless, it is mostly sustained by a [...]

By Victoria Grace Walden|2025-10-03T12:04:22+01:002 October 2025|

Playing the Holocaust – Part II

In late 2020, we hosted an academic discussion about the Holocaust and computer games called Playing the Holocaust - Part I. As a follow-up to that event, in early 2021, we brought together a variety of speakers working on the creation of such projects. Below you can watch the speaker's presentations from this event and find out more about how games designers, their collaborators, and museums have approached making games about this sensitive history. Our first speaker was Jörg Friedrich a game designer from Berlin and co-founder of Paintbucket Games, an independent game studio that made the historical resistance sim Through the Darkest of Times. Before he founded his own studio, Jörg worked for 15 years in creatively influential roles on big production games like Spec Ops:The Line, Dead Island or Drakensang. Jörg is also a freelance lecturer of game and narrative design at a number of schools and universities. https://youtu.be/zGUWSt7CYzk Next up, Noemie Lopian and games designer Dan Hett spoke about their work translating her father's experiences into a computer game. Dr Noemie Lopian is the daughter of Holocaust survivors Dr Ernst Israel Bornstein and Renee Bornstein. In the last few years, she has dedicated her time [...]

By Victoria Grace Walden|2024-11-28T11:19:26+00:008 September 2021|