About Victoria Grace Walden

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So far Victoria Grace Walden has created 77 blog entries.

#Hashtag Commemoration: A Comparison of Public Engagement with Commemoration Events for Neuengamme, Srebrenica, and Beau Bassin During Covid-19 Lockdowns

Abstract In our chapter, we investigate how the Covid-19 restrictions affected the translation of in-person commemorative ceremonies into online-only events. Whilst the majority of existing research has a relatively small scale, we have turned to the larger scope of social media data to examine wider online memory culture. To do so, we conduct comparative analysis of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram data from institutions organising commemorative events for the liberation of Neuengamme, the massacre at Srebrenica, and the liberation of Beau Bassin together with non-institutional posts using the hashtags from these institutions. Through this analysis, we aim to answer our main research questions: how do the online discourses by institutions and the wider public compare in relation to posts using shared hashtags during major commemoration periods during Covid-19 lockdowns? To what extent did the move to remote engagement during the pandemic reconfigure the so-called bifurcation of memory culture, between institutional and popular memory discourse (Hoskins, 2014) in any way that might suggest that the lockdowns evidence a change in commemoration practices? Our findings demonstrate that despite the major anniversaries marked in 2020, related memory institutions had little impact on social media, and their commemorative approaches in these spheres were not transformed [...]

By |2024-11-12T14:10:08+00:0015 December 2023|

Is Digitalization a Blessing or a Curse for Holocaust Memorialization?

Published in Eastern European Holocaust Studies Introduction I recently commented on the international furore provoked by the plans Moscow filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky leaked in May 2020 for the renovation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre.[1] In its critique, The New York Times[2] states that a computer algorithm designed to create a personalised museum experience would assign visitors the roles of executioner, collaborator, or victim: donning a VR headset, they would be placed into the historical scenes of the massacre with the use of deep fake technology. The media storm that erupted after this leak led to Khrzhanovsky’s plans being dropped. Putting the controversy aside, Khrzhanovsky’s proposal was nevertheless ambitious in foregrounding the symbiotic relationship between computational and human agency in digital environments, which is an affordance of contemporary technologies rarely emphasised in Holocaust museums and memorial sites’ digital projects. One of the issues often neglected when we pose the questions “is digitalisation a blessing or a curse for Holocaust memorialisation?”, is that digital interventions are not entirely automated and out of human control; rather they are an entanglement between computational and human logics and materialities.[3] To put this more bluntly, whether digitalization of Holocaust memorialisation is a blessing or a [...]

By |2024-11-12T14:27:28+00:0010 March 2023|

Recommendations for Digitising Material Evidence of the Holocaust

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 Holocaust collections are becoming increasingly digitised. Whilst digitisation offers many opportunities, especially in terms of preservation and public access to material evidence of this past, it nevertheless also introduces new challenges for Holocaust heritage. Digital technologies offer the potential for more networked connections between institutions, this is not always easy. There is a lack of consistency in vocabularies used for metadata, national and supranational laws affecting digital dissemination differ across the world, and there is unevenness across the sector in terms of resources (time, technological, and human) that can be dedicated to digitisation projects, and digital literacies and capacities. Despite the public misconception that 'the Nazis left little evidence of their crimes', there are large swathes of historical documents and objects that testify to the violences enacted during the Holocaust. The Arolsen Archives, alone, has more than 50 million reference cards and 30 million documents from concentration and forced labour camps, and files on displaced persons. Beyond contemporary evidence of the Holocaust, there are substantial collections [...]

By |2024-11-12T15:01:20+00:0027 January 2023|

Recommendations for using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for 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. Forward The majority of academic research that offers commentary on digital Holocaust projects tends to focus on what is seen by users at the interface. For example, the simulation of human-to-human dialogue in interactive biography projects or avatars in Second Life. Far less attention has been given to the invisible processes that inform what data is retrieved by the user. Artificial intelligence and machine learning already impact Holocaust education and memory, although their influence is more predominant in public online spaces - such as search engines - than within the work of professional institutions dedicated to teaching about and commemorating this past. How might Holocaust organisations harness the possibilities of these technologies for 'good'? What challenges do they need to navigate to achieve this? What support do they need, and from whom, to manage this substantial task? Holocaust education and memory developed within and alongside the so-called broadcast era of seemingly fixed, closed texts. Once a novel is published or a film released, the production process is [...]

By |2024-11-12T15:01:09+00:0027 January 2023|

Recommendations for using Social Media for 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. Forward The social media landscape is ever-changing as is its relationship to Holocaust memory and education. In the earlier days of Facebook and Twitter's dominance, there was a clear divide of opinions in the Holocaust sector. On one hand, some institutions were early adopters (notably the Auschwitz State Museum) and others experimented with the affordances of these platforms such as the team at Grodzka Gate, Lublin extending the analogue practice of school pupils sending letters to child Holocaust victim Henio Zytomirski onto Facebook and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's 'tweet-up' hybrid architecture tour. On the other hand, expressions of hesitance about these participatory spaces informed the need for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Education Working Group to establish guidelines for using social media in this context (2014). As practice grew, it also became somewhat formalised with most organisations predominantly focusing on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for public engagement work, and most content presenting traditional curation of historical sources with additional narrative, promoting the organisation's offline (or [...]

By |2024-11-12T14:59:40+00:0027 January 2023|

Recommendations for Digitally Recording, Recirculating and Remixing Holocaust Testimony

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. Forward Testimony has always raised ethical issues, especially in relation to questions of provenance, integrity, ownership, and authenticity. Nevertheless, it has become one of the most powerful sources for Holocaust education. Meeting a Holocaust survivor in- person has been a particular tenet of educational experiences. Looking forward, we face dual challenges: (1) the decline in numbers of living witnesses to the Holocaust, (2) the increasing prevalence of digital technologies. It has been somewhat taken for granted that the latter offers solutions for dealing with the former. Media technologies have been integral to the dissemination of Holocaust testimony since the 1940s. From the attempts to smuggle out material evidence of witnessing atrocities on photographic film to the scraps of paper and writing implements used to document experiences and wishes for the future, from the Oneg Shabbat archives of the Warsaw Ghetto to the 'Scrolls of Auschwitz'. It is however in the immediate post- war period with Boder's wire recordings that spoken testimony of events after the fact began [...]

By |2024-11-12T14:58:26+00:0027 January 2023|

The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age

Abstract The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age is the first comprehensive review of thinking and practice related to the effects and affects of the digital for memorial museums. These commemorative and educational spaces have traditionally contained object-heavy displays to stand-in for people, cultures and things that have been destroyed. What then happens when collected material evidence is presented to visitors/ users in digitalised forms – distanced from the material proximity offered at so-called ‘authentic sites’? Whilst memorial museums have often been celebrated for their commemorative and educative agendas, they are also political and tend to reiterate museological logics deeply embedded in problematic histories of arranging cultural objects and identities. Can digital technologies offer the potential to rearrange or resituate the memorial museum into activist spaces? Can going online disrupt the national memory politics that commonly characterise memorial museums, or does it enable more of the same? These are some of the questions that interest the contributors of this collection. Whilst there is a growing number of publications interested in museums and the digital, the specificity of the memorial museum is understudied. Yet, it raises particular concerns relating to preservation, materiality, ethics, and absence that require careful consideration in relation to [...]

By |2024-11-12T14:12:49+00:0015 December 2022|

Serious TikTok: Can You Learn About the Holocaust in 60 seconds? 

by Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Tom Divon, Hebrew University, Jerusalem In this month's post, our guest contributors explore multimodal education and commemoration of the Holocaust on today's most popular social media platform. In less than a year, the trending short-video platform TikTok transformed from a mostly entertaining environment for lip-syncing, dancing, and other self-performances into an interest-based platform for sharing information about politics, sexuality, identity, history, and other topics. This development was accompanied by the rise of a format which we describe as “serious TikTok”. In such videos, users communicate socio-political affairs in engaging ways through digital storytelling while harnessing the platform’s features, aesthetics, and dialects, allowing them to creatively unpack complex topics, contextualise and provide information. Following a controversy about TikTok users who performed as fictional Holocaust victims in a #POVHolocaustChallenge in August 2020, as well as the increase in antisemitic harassment and hate speech on the platform, ways of seriously dealing with the complex history of the Holocaust on TikTok gained special attention. In the following, we explore the specific modes individual and institutional TikTok creators use to address the history and memory of the Holocaust in their short video-memes and their ways of using TikTok’s aesthetics and vernaculars [...]

By |2024-11-28T11:17:52+00:0024 March 2022|

Understanding Holocaust memory and education in the digital age: before and after Covid-19

Abstract This editorial introduces this special edition of Holocaust Studies, which reflects on how bringing concerns central to the fields of Digital Media, Communication and Cultural Studies to bear on Holocaust Studies raises significant questions that could help inform memory and educational initiatives for the future. The editorial contextualizes the increasing visibility of denial and distortion online within algorithmic, participatory, and gaming cultures, that have the potential to benefit memory activism as much as they draw attention to dangerous alternative rhetoric. Nevertheless, it also highlights a need to think more carefully about the complicity of educators, curators, and researchers in unethical digital practices. Before introducing the contributions to this special edition of Holocaust Studies, it then briefly reflects on some of the trends that Holocaust organizations adopted during the Covid-19 Pandemic. This special edition, perhaps, offers more questions than answers, but establishing the right questions is an important step towards expanding the disciplinary boundaries of ‘Holocaust Studies’, so that it is befitting of the digital age. The full article can be accessed here.

By |2024-11-12T14:26:34+00:0014 December 2021|
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