Comparing Online Commemoration Events
Does the form of commemoration events alter when organisations are forced to move them online? This blog considers the impact digital has on what commemoration events are and could be.
Holocaust Remembrance in a Digital Future: Towards Deep Truth or Deep Fake?
On Thursday 4th February, I was very honoured to join Stephanie Billib, Bergen-Belsen Memorial, and PhD candidate Tabea Widemann to discuss the tensions between 'deep truth' and 'deep fake' in digital Holocaust remembrance. The panel was part of a larger programme: The Digitalisation of Memory: Technology - Possibilities - Boundaries hosted in partnership between the Falstad Centre in Norway, and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Poland. In this week's blog, I reflect on some of the themes that arose in that panel. The End of an Era? Whilst there were earlier instances of testimony gathering (including David Boder's immediate post-war recordings and the extensive Fortunoff collection at Yale in the 1970s), since the 1990s, the impetus to record survivor testimonies in a range of media formats has been heightened by the fear of an approaching post-witness age (Tanja Schult and Diana I. Popescu). This has been framed as an end of an era, as the Holocaust shifting from living memory to mediated memory (James E. Young) or from what Annette Wieviorka termed 'the era of the witness' to the 'era of the user' (Susan Hogervorst). Yet such framing makes three assumptions: That digital technology, or media [...]
Algorithmic Auditing, the Holocaust, and Search Engine Bias
In this guest post, Mykola Makhortykh discusses what algorithmic auditing of search engines can reveal about image searches and Holocaust knowledge online.
Capturing Experiential Authenticity at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
For many people, a visit to the Auschwitz Museum is a highly affective and important event. The thoughts, feelings and memories created during a visit constitute an authentic experience, which museumgoers are keen to capture and remember. This is often undertaken through the use of digital devices and social media posts – but what are the potential challenges of using technology onsite, and how does the Museum respond to this form of memory-making? On Holocaust Memorial Day 2021, we welcome guest blogger Imogen Dalziel, who explores these issues and suggests how the physical and digital can come together to further shape visitors’ experiences. Auschwitz's Authenticities The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum prides itself on being an ‘authentic site’ (e.g., Cywiński 2015). This term is oft used in public discourse to describe historical places, particularly those where atrocities happened. These sites provide material evidence of the tragedies enacted here. In academic literature, however, the concept of authenticity is a complicated one, long-debated and widely interpreted across a diverse range of academic fields, reaching far beyond ideas of what is real or true (see: Trilling 1972; Handler 1986; Phillips 1997; Lovell and Bull 2018, and others). Due to spatial constraints, I shall not fully [...]
Student Competition: Thinking about Computer Games and the Holocaust
In December 2020, I had the honour of teaching students at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. As part of their course, we ran a competition to ask them to apply what they had learnt about computer games and the Holocaust to a proposal for a new game. This blog introduces the winning pitches.
Online Holocaust Denial and Distortion
Despite the proclaimed successes against Holocaust denial and distortion in 2020, this blog post examines how we need to understand the phenomenon as part of wider digital cultures.
From Intermediality to Entanglement: New Methods for Studying Digital Holocaust Memory
Introducing new ways to think about digital interventions, and digital futures, in Holocaust memory.
Playing the Holocaust – Part 1
Recordings from our online discussion 'Playing the Holocaust - Part 1' held on Friday 20th November 2020.
Reading Call of Duty: WWII as Digital Holocaust Memory
Kate Marrison considers the decline of player agency in Call of Duty: WWII and how it speak to debates about Holocaust etiquette.
Finding Virtuality in Virtual Holocaust Museums
Lockdown is here again, for many of us. As museums, cultural and heritage centres close their doors again, this week’s blog reflects on what is a virtual museum, and offers various links to different experiences that you might want to ‘visit’ (in lieu of in-person trips) or share with students. What is ‘virtual’ about virtual museums? Virtuality is so frequently used interchangeably with digital, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish whether a museum – or indeed any other online experience – is trying to present itself as a virtual experience or a specifically digital one, or indeed both! Attempts to virtually transport users into photographic, videographic, or photogrammetry representations of physical museum sites can often feel like remediations of in-person experiences of visiting museums as we are offered limited navigational paths through the exhibits. The main difference is that online we move representations towards us by clicking on arrows or highlighted content rather than moving our bodies closer to them, as we do in the physical space. Whilst remediated experiences of physical exhibition spaces have become particularly popular during the pandemic, given we cannot see them in-person, there are many forms of virtual museums, some of which are digitally-born [...]