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About Victoria Grace Walden

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So far Victoria Grace Walden has created 78 blog entries.

Sustainable Digital Futures for Holocaust Memory and Education: Recommendations for Funders and Policymakers

This report is the accumulation of ideas explored in a workshop, held at the University of Sussex in June 2024. Read the full report here. Abstract Digital interventions have existed in Holocaust memory and education contexts since the 1990s. However, the term “digital” is still conceptualised, practiced and debated in both academic and professional circles as if it is a relatively new phenomenon. The effect of this means that besides the very largest of Holocaust museums and memorial sites, few have coherent digital strategies, appropriate digital infrastructure, or permanent digital expertise amongst their staff. This trend echoes through funding and policy circles.  Where international work has leveraged the digital, such as through the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, this has focused on public access to archival metadata and academic research audiences rather than public memory and education. Where specific funding for digital Holocaust memory and education exists, it tends to be project-focused, providing short-term investments which leave institutions searching for further funds, or projects being abandoned due to a lack of support for maintenance and impact analysis. To address this “sustainability crisis” in digital Holocaust memory and education, research has shown that interventions are needed at policy and funding, institutional, staff, [...]

By |2025-04-25T11:13:41+01:0025 April 2025|
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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 [...]

By |2025-04-03T09:46:39+01:003 April 2025|
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Spotlight: Dachau Memorial

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The Director of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab reflects on how digitally-mediated experiences of Dachau Memorial rearrange the site’s meaning and affect for her. On arrival at KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, most visitors close the gate which reads ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ so they can take a photograph of the infamous slogan. There is no suggestion from the site’s curators or educators that this is a proposed activity at the site – indeed there is no invitation to ‘touch’ historical things (although the gate in-situ is a replica), yet most visitors feel compelled to do this – perhaps due to the iconicity of these three words. This now ritualistic behaviour is illustrative of the fact that however well ‘curated’ or ‘managed’ memorial sites seem to be, their role as memorial spaces and the meaning and relations relating to the past constructed there rely on the performativity of the multitude of different agents who come to occupy the place – however transiently. As I walked through the gate the first time during a 5-day research trip to the site, my eyes and thus my whole-bodily attention were draw to two things immediately: the guard tower across the roll call [...]

By |2025-02-26T17:26:23+00:0026 February 2025|
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The View From: Visiting Researchers

Last term, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab welcomed visiting researchers from University of Bern, Dr Mykola Makhortykh and Maryna Sydorova who specialise in humanities and data science with a particular interest in machine learning and AI. Find out about the productive knowledge exchange that took place. by Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, in conversation with Dr Mykola Makhortykh and Maryna Sydorova   Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden: So, Mykola and Maryna, what did you do during your time with us at the University of Sussex? Dr Mykola Makhortykh: We did a lot in two weeks. We agreed to do a symposium on the use of AI for producing historical knowledge and possible considerations regarding it, and a guest lecture about some of our ongoing projects on the use of AI for (mis)representing modern armed conflicts. We also brainstormed future collaborations with the Lab team and possible funding applications. The Lab’s director Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden prepared a schedule of daily to-dos, so we got our fellowship period planned in lots of detail. For me, it worked really well and I think we had an incredibly productive time both in terms of networking with Lab members and other Sussex scholars. We got a [...]

By |2025-02-13T11:04:53+00:0013 February 2025|
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Spotlight: A Town Called Auschwitz

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The 27 January 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. These former Nazi concentration and death camps respectively are two of the most visited historical sites in Europe, yet the Jewish history of the town in which Auschwitz lies is far less known. In this month's Spotlight, we take a look at the development of the augmented reality app making visible this past.  The Polish town Oświeçim was called ‘Auschwitz’ in German both back in the 15th Century and during the Nazi Occupation. It was also known as ‘Oshpitzin’ in Yiddish. The diverse names given to this town are indicative of its historical multicultural nature. Whilst modest in size, Oświeçim was well-connected by rail, which helped merchants arrive to sell goods in its central market square. These transport links would of course go on to have a more sinister role under Nazi rule, enabling the mass movement of Jews, Roma and Sinti, and other victims from across Europe to Auschwitz I and later also Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II). As major commemorations take place at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to mark the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of prisoners this [...]

By |2025-01-22T16:25:29+00:0022 January 2025|
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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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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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