by Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden
Lab director Dr Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden details how we came to run a workshop together with the United Nations and the Holocaust Outreach Programme earlier this summer. The event provided a forum for world-leading Holocaust commemoration organisations, international funders, and UK Parliament to explore the impact they could have on the future of global digital Holocaust memory.
Between 2022 and 2023, the Lab’s current research team – Dr Kate Marrison and me – ran a series of online co-creation workshops with our project partners. The project led to the publication of 6 recommendation reports providing guidance on digital interventions in Holocaust memory and education.
The workshops were composed of more than 120 diverse stakeholders, from Holocaust organisations, the wider heritage sector, creative and technical professionals, and academics from broad range of disciplines.
A recurring theme emerged: there was a lot of enthusiasm and imagination for developing digital work in the Holocaust sector, but funding bids and a lack of (inter)national policy guidelines hampered development. Representatives from Holocaust organisations expressed many frustrations including a lack of coherent digital strategy; long-term, project funding; and permanent staff with digital expertise. Problems which many felt could be tackled at funding and policy levels.
The published reports made specific recommendations aimed at funders and policymakers:
- provide financial support for larger organisations with sound infrastructure to support smaller archives and organisations
- invest in digital infrastructure and teams – moving towards a permanent digital funding strategy for Holocaust collections
- reorientate funding models towards long-term, sustainable, sector-wide digitisation and digitalisation plans and make open data and open source a requirement for grants where appropriate
- provide funding for sector-wide impact analysis of projects
- provide the same job security and esteem to individuals and teams with technical expertise as given to curators, researchers and archivists
- establish a working group within the IHRA of experts to focus on the ‘digital’
- support more academic research about the significance of Holocaust memory and education on social media, and advocate for more possibilities for data collection from platforms
We’re a research-informed team supporting digital innovation in Holocaust memory and education. Our core objective is to help the sector to be better equipped for the digital age. It seemed pertinent then, to get organisations who might be able to work towards these recommendations into a room together. If we want digital Holocaust memory to be more sustainable, then we need more joined-up thinking at policy and funding levels.
So earlier this summer, we held a workshop for policymakers and funders together with the United Nations and the Holocaust Outreach Programme.
At our University of Sussex home, we were joined by representatives from the Association of Jewish Refugees, Claims Conference, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, European Commission, and Sir Eric Pickles (IHRA President and Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, UK Parliament), and representatives from UNESCO and our funders, the Alfred Landecker Foundation, joined virtually.
Before launching into the main discussions for the day, we were honoured with opening words from our Vice Chancellor Professor Sascha Roseneil and the Rt Hon. The Lord Pickles. Professor Roseneil highlighted the significance of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab in relation to the University of Sussex’s strategic foci: human flourishing, digital and data futures, and environmental sustainability – which for us are deeply interlinked. Whilst Lord Pickles emphasised the dangers and challenges that Holocaust education faces today, challenging the ‘post-Holocaust’ part of his Parliamentary title as he reinforced the significance of Holocaust history to today’s world.
We then focused on two themes: mapping existing priorities for the Holocaust commemoration and education sector, and scenario planning for the future.
In the session on mapping priorities, we asked participants to consider current needs within the sector, how these related to what they perceive as priorities in digital culture, and what their organisations were already doing in this area.
We based the scenario planning session, on ‘future studies’ methodology (for more on this method, see Bezold 1999), asking participants to focus on developing plans for extreme possible futures.
At one extreme we asked them to consider a future in which generative AI became the main gateway for the general public into Holocaust memory. And, at the other, more positive extreme, we discussed an opportunity for Holocaust organisations across the world to contribute to a virtual museum untethered from any local or national memory politics.
Look out for our report on the outcomes of these discussions which will be published this Autumn.
We’re grateful to the number of project partners who have worked with us on the reports: The University of Bern; iRights.Lab, Germany; The Centre of Life Writing and Life History, University of Sussex; The Hebrew University; Future Memory Foundation; and the Historical Games Network.
Want to know more?
Download all the reports here.