2022 – A Year in Review

Posted byVictoria Grace WaldenPosted inUncategorisedTags:, , , , , , , ,
2022

The Digital Holocaust Memory blog may have been quiet in 2022, but we have continued developing research involving participants in the US, Europe, Israel and Australia.

Highlights

  1. Publishing this post on International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2023, we are please to announce we are releasing the first four of our recommendations reports for digital interventions in Holocaust memory and education. The reports were developed through interdisciplinary, co-creation workshops held in 2022, which involved more than 80 individuals from a wide range of academic disciplines, creative and tech professionals, and those working in Holocaust organisations. We encourage you to read, share, and participate in actioning these recommendations. You can access the reports on AI and Machine Learning, Social Media, Digitising Material Evidence, and Recording, Recirculating and Remixing Testimony here. We will be releasing two further reports this year on Computer Games and Virtual Memoryscapes. We are really grateful to funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, and the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex which made these workshops possible. We are also very thankful to the project partners who co-hosted the workshops so far:  The University of Bern; iRights.Lab, Germany; The Centre of Life Writing and Life History, University of Sussex; and The Hebrew University.
  2. In November 2023, we published the open access e-book The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age with REFRAME. The book should be seen as a complement to previous publications dedicated solely to digital Holocaust memory. This book expands beyond the Holocaust context with contributors from 21 authors exploring how the concept of the memorial museum is being (re)conceptualised in digital spaces around the world. It has chapters on Port Arthur, Tasmania; 9/11; Kenya; Rwanda; Colombia; Argentina; Brazil; Nagasaki; Nanjing; Serbia; Bosnia; World War I memory in France; and Kashmir. The significant and urgency of this collection have been highlighted by the perilous position some of our authors have found themselves in during the production process, which is explained in the book. You can download the book for free here.
  3. Much of 2022 was occupied with the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust funded fieldwork strand of this project. Visiting Austria, Norway, the Netherlands, Serbia, Germany, Poland and the US, project lead Dr Victoria Grace Walden recorded interviews with those involved in the production of digital Holocaust projects and walkthroughs. The aim is to create an archive (of sorts) of fully searchable interviews with complementary walkthroughs that can provide a digital archaeology of digital Holocaust memory to date, enabling those involved in future projects to have access to the experiences of those who have come before. We are really grateful to colleagues at the following institutions and their creative partners for giving up their time to support this work, and hosting Dr Walden during her fieldwork: KZ-Gedenkstaette Mauthausen, Falstadsenteret, Herinneringscentrum Kamp Westerbork, Jewish Cultural Quarter (Amsterdam), The Anne Frank House, Terraforming, KZ-Gedenkstaette Dachau, Arolsen Archives, KZ-Gedenkstaette Neuengamme, KZ-Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen, Oshpitzin Museum, Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and USC Shoah Foundation. Thank you also to other organisations with whom we have been in contact about future fieldwork.
  4. Finally, we are pleased to announce that pre-prints related to the digital Holocaust memory project have all been made available via Dr Walden’s Academia.edu profile. We hope this provides access to the research for those without institutional library logins.

Public Engagement

Project lead Dr Walden was invited to be a jury member for the first ever XR History Awards and was glad to be part of the panel that choose Child of Empire by Project Dastaan, about experiences of the partitioning of India, as the winning work. She was also a member of the Professional Advisory Committee for the Claims Conference, which supported this important organisation’s work on structuring funding for social media projects related to the Holocaust. She was also please to see the release of the UNESCO/UN report ‘History Under Attack: Holocaust Denial and Distortion on Social Media’, for which she sat on the advisory board.

Dr Walden also acted as an expert trainer for the UK’s Holocaust and World War II Museums Partnership, helping to train the consortium’s digital interns, and was invited to speak at events for the United Nations, as part of the programme marking Novi Sad as the Capital of Remembrance Culture, the ‘Migrating Image/ Images Migration’ conference held by the Visual History of the Holocaust project hosted in Jerusalem, the ECommemoration Convention in Hamburg, ‘Museums and Mass Violence: Perils and Potential’ at Yale, and presented a public lecture at the Shoah Foundation, University of Southern California during her research visit. Where the talk was recorded, you can access them via the Public and Academic Presentations page on this website.

We also continue to offer consultancy and academic advisory support to museums, memorial organisations, and creative projects. Please do contact us if you would like to make use of our expertise.

Stats

Despite the lack of new content on the site in 2022, we are really pleased to see interest in existing content and joining our network has grown as illustrated by the stats below:

Grant Success

In the past 12 months, we have received grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, Higher Education Innovation Fund, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and financial support from the School of Media, Arts and Humanities. We look forward to producing further work supported by these monies.

Finally, we just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has contributed to and supported this project. The Digital Holocaust Memory Project is built on collaboration and it could not have developed without the time and effort contributed by so many.

Image by vikayatskina on Freepik

Published by Victoria Grace Walden

Professor of Digital Memory, Culture and Heritage at the University of Sussex. Dr Richardson-Walden is Director of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab and Deputy Director of the Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies. She has written extensively about digital interventions in Holocaust and genocide memory. She is author of 'Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory', and editor of 'Digital Holocaust Memory, Education and Research' and 'The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age'. She is also currently Co-I on an XR project based in Hungary, 'If These Streets Could Talk' and the Swedish research project 'Holocaust Contestation and Commemoration on Social Media'. Her recent projects include: PI on the ESRC-funded 'Co-creating Recommendations for Digital Interventions in Holocaust Memory and Education', the HEIF-funded 'Dealing with Difficult Heritage', and the British Academy-funded 'Digital Holocaust Memory: Hyperconnective Museums and Archives of the Future'. She has served as an advisor or consultancy for numerous organisations, including the Imperial War Museums, the United Nations and UNESCO, and the Claims Conference.

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