Paper

Digital Holocaust Memory – Resources and Readings

Over the summer, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab team members are busy taking well-deserved breaks. Whilst our blog goes on hiatus, here are some suggested reads from our back catalogue which might help inspire or inform your autumn teaching, research and practice. The remit of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab is broad – we conceptualise ‘the digital’ as socio-technical and thus connective, and as an entanglement of human and computational actancies. But what does this mean in practice? Firstly, it means our research covers a range of different digital media, this includes computer games. Last year we hosted an international junior research associate, Austin Xie, from the University of Chicago who thought through the challenges of navigating Holocaust memory in computer games shared in two blogs on our site, part I and part II. We also launched recommendations for using VR, XR and computer games. We captured more on these topics in our blog archive, check out pieces on Playing Memories, Reading Call of Duty, and student ideas for Holocaust computer games. The first series of our new Digital Memory Dialogues also focuses on this topic asking to what extent can the Holocaust be made playable in computer games? This [...]

Imagining Human-AI Memory Symbiosis

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, Director, Landecker Digital Memory Lab The editors of a recent journal special issue asked, ‘Is AI the Future of Collective Memory?’. Our Director and co-author Mykola Makhortykh were invited to answer this poignant question. The Problem of Anthropomorphism At the heart of our contribution to the special issue was an interrogation of the problem of anthropomorphism of AI. That is – the problem of describing AI using terms related to human activity to the extent that we tend to think about it as like us or even potentially better at doing human things than us. In the tech industry and in academic fields concerned with AI development, the narrative of artificial general intelligence (or ‘super’ intelligence) based on but one day superseding human cognitive capabilities served as a useful myth through which to market models and to attract vast levels of funding. This challenge has not simply come from critical thinkers in the humanities and sceptics, but from AI pioneers themselves, notably Nils Nilsson and Jaron Lanier. We took the question posed to us by the special issue’s editors Frédéric Clavert and Sarah Gensburger: ‘Is AI the Future of Collective Memory?’ and spun it [...]