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About Victoria Grace Walden

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So far Victoria Grace Walden has created 22 blog entries.

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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AI, Holocaust Distortion and Education

By Prof Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden At a conference in Bucharest last week, our Lab Director Prof Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden presented our position on the extent to which we should be engaging with AI for the sake of Holocaust education. I was invited by the US State Department to contribute to a panel called ‘Holocaust Denial and Distortion – New Challenges’, which focused on AI. I wanted to use the opportunity to emphasise the need for more research-informed engagement in how the Holocaust museum and education sector, and policymakers, deal with AI (and indeed digital media more generally). I was joined on the panel by Historian Jason Steinhauer, Professor of International Law Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias, and Jordana Cutler from Meta, and it was chaired by Ellen Germain, US Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues (all pictured in our banner image). Professor Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden speaking on the panel. Key takeaways are: What are we using AI for? We need to ask ourselves why we want to engage with AI? The question should not simply be ‘what is AI good for in the context of Holocaust memory and education?’ but rather ‘What do we want to achieve in Holocaust memory and education, and [...]

By |2024-11-11T14:38:17+00:007 November 2024|
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Spotlight on Žanis Lipke Memorial

by Dr Kate Marrison In this long-form series, we offer a deep dive introduction to digital projects at a Holocaust organisation. Each month, our ‘spotlight’ institutions will feature in our upcoming living database-archive. The journey to the Žanis Lipke Memorial took us on-foot over the Vanšu Bridge, which crosses the Daugava River, in Riga. A quick online search reveals that the word vanšu refers to the cables suspending its deck, comparing them to nautical rigging (also known as shrouds in English). Upon reaching the other side, we arrived in Ķīpsala Island, which was originally a fishing village, and followed Google Maps down the 150-year-old cobbled streets to discover the entrance to the memorial tucked behind houses at the end of a quiet lane. Aptly described by some as “Riga’s best-hidden museum”, this memorial is dedicated to the memory of Latvian Žanis (or Jānis) Lipke, who saved Jews from the Riga ghetto by hiding them in an underground bunker during the Nazi occupation of Latvia. The 3x3 metres bunker, built in 1942, housed between 8-12 people at a time. In total, between 1941 and 1945, the Lipke Family and their helpers successfully saved the lives of more than 50 Jews. The memorial itself, [...]

By |2024-11-11T14:29:34+00:0030 October 2024|
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An entangled memoryscape: Holocaust memory on social media

Abstract Within Holocaust studies, there has been an increasingly uncritical acceptance that by engaging with social media, Holocaust memory has shifted from the ‘era of the witness’ to the ‘era of the user’ (Hogervorst 2020). This paper starts by problematising this proposition. This claim to a paradigmatic shift implies that (1) the user somehow replaces the witness as an authority of memory, which neglects the wealth of digital recordings of witnesses now circulating in digital spaces and (2) agency online is solely human-centric, a position that ignores the complex negotiations between corporations, individuals, and computational logics that shape our digital experiences. This article proposes instead that we take a posthumanist approach to understanding Holocaust memory on, and with, social media. Adapting Barad's (2007) work on entanglement to memory studies, we analyse two case studies on TikTok: the #WeRemember campaign and the docuseries How To: Never Forget to demonstrate: (1) the usefulness of reading Holocaust memory on social media through the lens of entanglement which offers a methodology that accounts for the complex network of human and non-human actants involved in the production of this phenomenon which are simultaneously being shaped by it. (2) That professional memory institutions and organisations are [...]

By |2024-11-12T14:27:35+00:0024 October 2024|
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Three Phases of Digital Holocaust Memory Development

By Professor Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Through artificial intelligence, machine learning, crowdsourcing, digitisation, VR, AR and computer games, we take you on a tour of some of the world’s most prolific digital Holocaust memory initiatives by way of the theory of the ‘three stages’ of development. To argue that there are three phases of digital Holocaust memory development is not to suggest a clear and simple historical chronology from the 1990s – when digital technologies were first introduced into this arena – to now. Rather, this proposition offers a framework for mapping the different types of approaches organisations take when adopting digital media for the sake of Holocaust memory. These three phases are: the experimental, the normative, and the connective, and they define the different relationships organisations have with digital technology and cultures through their work. Let’s take a closer look at each of them. Experimental Phase This phase acknowledges periods of enthusiasm for a new medium, often led by a ‘what if?’ curiosity among a handful of digital advocates or a desire to shake up the status quo. During this phase, creators are explorative and playful with a medium’s possibilities, they’re not afraid to take risks and can be inquisitive [...]

By |2024-11-11T14:29:45+00:0023 October 2024|
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Recommendations for Gaming and Play in Holocaust Memory and Education

The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Foreword Digital games are becoming increasingly significant within Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies. The so-called Holocaust gaming taboo (Kansteiner 2017) which has burdened both the mainstream gaming industry and small indie studios seems to show signs of lifting. Scholars have pointed out that major FPS (first-person shooter) franchises such as Wolfenstein and Call of Duty have only teetered on representation of this past, often taking liberty with Nazi themes while placing the Holocaust within the margins or completely eliding the persecution of European Jewry altogether (Hayton 2015; Chapman and Linderoth 2015; Marrison 2020; van dan heede 2023). At the other end of the spectrum, game designers working with small- budget proposals had been “promptly pressured to abandon the project” (Kansteiner 2017, p.111-112) due to the backlash in public discourse, often prompted by professional Holocaust organisations denouncing the very premise of Holocaust games. However, the rising prominence of indie studios such as Paintbucket Games responsible for [...]

By |2024-11-12T17:25:50+00:0011 July 2024|
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Recommendations for Virtualising Holocaust Memoryscapes

The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Foreword Virtual reality and augmented reality experiences play an increasingly significant role in Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies into visitor and user experience. There is a rapidly expanding list of projects experimenting with cinematic virtual reality, photogrammetry, digital mapping, 3D modelling, 360-degree on-location survivor testimony as well as a growing portfolio of augmented and mixed reality mobile and tablet applications. Principally being implemented as spatial technologies, several memorial sites and museums are exploring the possibilities of creating 3D graphic reconstructions of former sites of Nazi persecution in AR/VR such as the digital reconstruction of Falstad Concentration Camp, the Here: Spaces for Memory App at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site, the Sobibor AR exhibit, the project Auschwitz VR as well as the 360-degrees-walks at Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Going further, some digital initiatives are using VR/AR/MR technologies to zoom in on historical documents, testimonies and artefacts, notable projects include the ARt AR App at the Dachau Memorial [...]

By |2024-11-12T17:26:22+00:0011 July 2024|
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New 4.1 Million Euro Lab to Launch at the University of Sussex

Dr Victoria Grace Walden and Dr Kate Marrison of the Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Sussex will be joined by an expanded team from the summer of 2024 to launch a new 5-year project funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation. Awarded 4,100,000 Euros, Dr Walden will lead the Landecker Digital Memory Lab: Connective Holocaust Commemoration which is dedicated to enhancing the sustainability of digital Holocaust memory. The lab will sit across both the Weidenfeld Institute and the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, benefiting from the rich research culture of both. Alongside the production of original research, the Lab’s activities will include: the development of a ‘living database-archive’, which will preserve recordings of digital projects dedicated to Holocaust memory complemented by interviews with professionals involved in their development and use at Holocaust sites (from programmers and designers to curators and educators). The ‘living database’ aims to help Holocaust memory and education institutions across the world learn from historical digital practice by providing the first database and archive of digital works in this field. a new online publishing space dedicated to digital Holocaust memory with an international editorial board designed to promote interdisciplinary and inter-sector dialogues across digital spaces. a [...]

By |2024-11-11T15:18:07+00:0022 April 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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