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About Victoria Grace Walden

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So far Victoria Grace Walden has created 74 blog entries.

2024: A Year in Review

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The year 2024 will be unforgettable to us, as the year we launched the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. We look back at what we’ve achieved. It was at a public lecture held at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in April that we were finally able to announce the Landecker Digital Memory Lab was coming into existence. Since then, we’ve been non-stop! My two-week residential at the museum also included co-hosting a symposium on ‘Preserving Truth in the Digital Age’ and led to us confirming the Melbourne Holocaust Museum as an official project partner. We’re looking forward to collaborating with them further. Read our ‘Spotlight’ piece on the museum to find out more about their digital work past and present. The Melbourne trip was followed in September by further fieldwork in Riga, Latvia at the Žanis Lipke Memorial where we explored their use of VR. Engagement with intergovernmental organisations, policymakers and funders was a dominant thread of our first few months, particularly with the hype about ‘AI’. In June, we hosted the workshop ‘Policy and Funding Sustainable Interventions in Digital Holocaust Memory and Education’ together with the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme. The event was attended by [...]

By |2025-01-13T09:27:29+00:008 January 2025|
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Imagining Human-AI Memory Symbiosis

How Re-Remembering the History of Artificial Intelligence Can Inform the Future of Collective Memory Abstract In this article, we critically examine the history of artificial intelligence (AI) to explore how it can shape the future of collective memory. By situating our work within critical debates that challenge the dominant anthropomorphising discourse of AI, we scrutinise how AI specificities shape its interactions with information about the past. We highlight how the development of AI has been often misremembered in public discourse, and by extension in the humanities, and explore the consequences for AI’s emerging status as a form of media memory. Based on our exploration, we outline three scenarios for the future of AI-shaped collective memory: 1) the reiteration of the simulative paradigm of AI media memory; 2) the enfolding of AI as an alien actant in human (memory) collectives; and 3) the recognition of the radical alterity of AI for human-AI memory symbiosis. The full article is available open access here.

By |2024-12-13T10:57:47+00:0013 December 2024|
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TikTok and Holocaust Memory: Where Commemoration and Algorithmic Culture Collide

by Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Our article ‘An Entangled Memoryscape: Holocaust Memory as Social Media’ was recently published in the academic journal Memory, Mind and Media. Here we summarise the key findings.   The article written by myself and my colleague Dr Kate Marrison questions the uncritical acceptance across Holocaust Studies that there has been a paradigmatic shift from the ‘era of the witness’ (Wieviroka 2006) to the ‘era of the user’ (Hogervost 2020). Instead, it adopts a post-humanist approach, working with the writing of Karen Barad (2007) to argue that social media engagements with the Holocaust should be understood through the lens of entanglement. What this means is that social media is ‘socio-technical’ (van Dijck 2013) – any ‘agency’ (although we prefer Barad’s word ‘actancy’) involved in its creation involves a multitude of human and non-human actors in an ongoing, iterative process embedded in a variety of social contexts. This includes the corporate platforms, their algorithms and ideologies, the content creators, the platform itself, and the users who comment, like and otherwise interact with shared content. Furthermore, it means that social media does not just produce Holocaust memory, but that Holocaust memory content on these platforms has the potential to [...]

By |2024-12-12T10:43:01+00:0012 December 2024|
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Policy Briefing: Does AI have a Place in the Future of Holocaust Memory?

This policy briefing was presented to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance at events held in November/December 2024. You can download the original briefing here. Summary This briefing offers research-informed recommendations to support policymakers and those working in Holocaust memory and education organisations to navigate the place of AI systems in this field. It offers a brief introduction to what AI is, what the possible implications of these systems are for Holocaust memory and education, and then key recommendations. Key Recommendations Good data is needed to better inform publicly available AI systems. The right representation of expertise is needed in the training and supervision of AI systems. A middle-ground is required in terms of guardrails put in place to protect against the misuse of Holocaust history without making it entirely invisible. Digital technology needs to be prioritised and maintained on the agendas of intergovernmental policymakers in relation to Holocaust memory and education. AI should be used to give users access to the complexities and nuances of the past, rather than oversimplified summaries. Definitions AI has become an ‘empty signifier’ (Lindgren 2024) – a catchall term for a wide range of technologies and systems. When approaching this topic from a policy perspective, [...]

By |2024-12-05T16:20:56+00:005 December 2024|
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10 key implications for AI in Holocaust memory and education

by Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Our Lab Director has recently been engaging with delegates of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance about AI and Holocaust memory, tackling topics including mass digitisation of archival and historical material and the risks of distortion and disinformation. In this week’s blog she discusses what emerged from recent events organised by the IHRA, including our new policy briefing. I have had the pleasure to engage with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (the IHRA) on two occasions in the last few weeks because under their UK Presidency in 2024, it has decided to focus on the significance of AI for Holocaust memory and education. Firstly, I spoke at an online AI workshop with approximately 70 people, organised by the IHRA's Education Working Group. Then, this past weekend, I presented the opening paper at the conference ‘AI in the Holocaust Education, Research and Remembrance Sector’ at Lancaster House, London. My role at these events was really to set the scene for those who are policymakers and Holocaust education and history experts, but less savvy about emerging digital technologies. At the core of my presentations was the question: what are the implications of AI for Holocaust memory and education in [...]

By |2024-12-05T17:16:20+00:005 December 2024|
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How a Dislike of ‘Goodbyes’ Inspired Our Digital Holocaust Memory Programme

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The Landecker Digital Memory Lab is up and running, but how did we get to this point? How did it all begin?  The Director of the Lab gives her personal account of the events which led to the official launch event in London last week. I have a habit of not wanting to say goodbye to wonderful people when I meet them – this habit has served the Lab well. It’s always difficult trying to write an origin story because the way life twists and turns tends to make it difficult to identify a particular moment as pivotal. However, there are probably two moments that can be considered the origins of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab: The first British Association of Holocaust Studies Conference in 2014 held by the University of Southampton and University of Winchester. The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure’s (EHRI) Conference in 2019 held in Amsterdam, on the theme: ‘Holocaust Studies in the Digital Age. What’s New?’ During my PhD, I had wanted to explore the use of (digital) screens in Holocaust museums, but I was in a traditional film studies department, so this wasn’t possible. I settled on exploring the ‘intermedialities’ of [...]

By |2024-12-02T09:53:16+00:0028 November 2024|
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Building the Lab – Part 3: Our Official Launch

by Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, Director, Landecker Digital Memory Lab The Landecker Digital Memory has officially launched. To mark the pivotal moment, we held an event in London in front of a distinguished audience of academics, policymakers, Holocaust memorial sites and museums, educators, journalists, filmmakers, digital media creatives, politicians and Holocaust survivors and their descendants. After months of hard work establishing our team, aims, values, and starting to build the initiatives we are launching in 2025 and beyond, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab officially launched this week at the Imperial War Museum in London. We felt a real buzz in the room as attendees enjoyed a drinks reception, an exclusive review of our forthcoming policy guidance on AI and Holocaust memory, and had the opportunity to preview some of our walkthrough videos ahead of the launch next year of our living database-archive. All of our guests were invited to an ‘after hours’ private viewing of the Imperial War Museum’s award-winning Holocaust Galleries, following a fascinating introduction by its curator and the Museum’s Head of Public History, Dr James Bulgin. As I introduced our plans for the next five years, we were joined by an audience of more than 150 people [...]

By |2024-11-22T10:17:52+00:0022 November 2024|
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Indexing the World’s Digital Holocaust Projects: the Historian’s View

by Alex Sessa In 2025, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab will launch the world’s first ‘living database-archive': a perpetual, searchable resource of the world’s digital Holocaust education and commemoration initiatives. As we embark on this monumental project, read about the linguistic and ethical challenges this task brings from the view of our historian-indexer. We live in an age in which the Holocaust is quickly receding from living memory. At a time when the youngest survivors are in their eighties and nineties, lived experience of this past is quickly disappearing. Heritage organisations are, therefore, exploring digital technologies as a means of making Holocaust memory accessible. Here at the Landecker Digital Memory Lab, we have created digital walkthroughs of emerging digital projects at Holocaust sites across Europe, the US and Australia (to date). The purpose of these projects is to enhance understanding of developing trends in Holocaust memory culture to learn and to commemorate. The purpose of our living database-archive is to help professionals working in Holocaust memory and education organisations, and their creative partners learn from existing practice, and to help academics easily access the global range of projects. Our digital recordings offer a guide, or a blueprint for digital projects [...]

By |2024-11-15T08:25:27+00:0014 November 2024|
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Official launch of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab

On Monday 18th November 2024, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab officially launched to an audience of c. 200 people joining us both in-person at the Imperial War Museum, London and from across the globe via our live-stream. The event saw our Lab Director Professor Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden introduce our plans for the next five years, highlighting how our work has become more imperative since the amplification of antisemitism and Holocaust distortion, denial and contestation since October 7th 2023. You can read more about who we are, our aims, and our outputs across this website. Professor Richardson-Walden was joined by a series of special guests. Lena Altman, Co-CEO of our funder and key project partner, the Alfred Landecker Foundation, who provided the welcome address. Then after the main presentation, Lord Pickles (UK Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues and President of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) addressed the bigger picture in which the Lab's work sits. He was followed by Professor Sasha Roseneil (Vice-Chancellor) and Professor Cornel Sandvoss (Executive Dean of the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities) both offering the view from the University of Sussex, addressing how the Lab's work complements the university's wider values and emphasising the importance of [...]

By |2024-11-11T14:32:35+00:0011 November 2024|
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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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