Behind the Scenes at the Lab: What’s in the Works?
It’s been an extremely busy start to the year at the Lab. Find out what we’ve been up to behind the scenes as we approach an exciting new phase of our programme.
We kicked off 2025 by welcoming a new member of the team. Research Fellow Dr Ben Pelling has an academic background in History and his previous postdoctoral role focused on the impact of digitisation on conspiracy theories across Europe.
Last month, he presented some work in progress related to our living database archive at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab‘s Research Forum alongside some fascinating projects, including one about AI in music.
Welcome Ben. We are very happy that you have joined the team.
Holocaust Memorial Day
Early February saw an excellent Holocaust Memorial Day programme hosted by University of Sussex, the first university in England to commemorate this annual event.
Our Director Professor Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden took part in a discussion and Q&A with founder and president of the UK Jewish Film Festival Judy Ironside MBE focused on the screening of Letter to a Pig. The short film is an Oscar-nominated animation Letter to a Pig (watch the ‘making of’), which explores a young girl’s dream after listening to a survivor’s testimony through rotoscoping.
Watch a video of the discussion.
Prof. Richardson-Walden also introduced and participated in the post-screening discussion for Roma Holocaust memorial day here on campus for the film The Deathless Woman by Roz Mortimer.
During the same programme, Lab Research Fellow Dr Kate Marrison ran a workshop with 15 year-10 students and 2 teachers from Eastbourne Academy, organised by the University’s Widening Participation Team.
Using iPads, she invited students to explore and discuss a range of case studies from around the world, from 3D reconstructions of memorial sites, interactive survivor testimony installations, computer games and augmented and virtual reality applications. Dr Marrison asked students to design their own digital Holocaust memory project and results included a game modelled on WhatsApp, where fake news and real news could be integrated with historical newspapers from the time.
Read about a previous workshop Dr Marrison ran with young people.
Afterwards, the students and teachers joined the wider annual main event where they listened to an extremely moving survivor testimony from Holocaust survivor Peter Summerfield BEM. Watch the video of his testimony.
A post-talk Q&A was chaired by Prof. Gideon Reuveni, Director of The Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies.
Artificial Intelligence continued…
Following the publication of our policy briefing on AI at the end of last year, AI remains a hot topic within the field digital Holocaust memory. Last month, our Director participated in the University’s History department’s work-in-progress seminar to share ideas about AI and the production of historical knowledge.
“It was great to share them with historians having previously also disseminated this to the Sussex AI community in January at their annual conference” says Prof. Richardson-Walden and described it as “a fascinating opportunity to share initial ideas around AI, history, memory, and the ontology of the (AI-generated) image.”
The ideas discussed stemmed from collaborations with our visiting fellows from University of Bern before Christmas, Dr Mykola Makhortykh and Maryna Sydorova. Find out more about the productive knowledge exchange that took place.
The Sussex AI conference offered an opportunity to share this work with an interdisciplinary audience both as a presentation and academic poster. These then inspired a few computer scientists in the audience to explore what the MidJourney generative-AI model produced when they tried different prompts related to Holocaust memory.
And finally, she presented at an online roundtable for the Memory Studies Association’s digital events series (dMSA) called ‘Is AI the future of collective memory?’. The event marked the launch of a special issue of the same name released in the journal Memory Studies Review, for which her and Dr Makhortykh co-authored the article ‘Imagining Human-AI Memory Symbiosis’.
All systems go
Alongside this work, the whole Lab team has been all systems go in preparing our flagship event ‘Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo 2025’.
More than 100 participants from several countries have already registered to join us this summer to share their research and practice through talks, workshops, exhibitions, our VR suite, arcade, exhibitor hall, ‘let’s play’ sessions, networking lunches, and panel discussions about who the ‘memory-makers’ of tomorrow will be in a dynamic, international environment.
The three-day event brings together heritage experts, digital and creative media professionals, Holocaust organisations, filmmakers, academics, educators and policymakers. They will collaborate to focus on the present and future of digital Holocaust memory initiatives.
In anticipation of the Expo, we ran a competition to design our logo for the event. Huge congratulations to Richard Barrett of Gilmour Graphics who won a £500 award, an all-expenses-paid place for the event and international exposure for their design which will appear on all promotional material and merchandise.
Major projects
Work continues apace on our other two major projects: Digital Memory Dialogues and the living-database archive.
We’re delighted to have confirmed the contributors for our first Digital Memory Dialogues series, an innovative online publishing space, following a meeting with our editorial board that was invigorating and full of energy, we also exchanged ideas for the next 4.5 years’ of content. More on this soon.
And on the development of our perpetual living database-archive, our focus is, excitingly, now about to turn to user testing. There has been a huge amount of work going on in software development, cataloguing, indexing, transcribing and preparing the digital assets for this major resource.
We will be blogging about these developments in the coming months as part of our ethos to ‘work out in the open’.
A huge thank you to Dr Alex Sessa, who joined us for 5 months as our Senior Research Associate developing our catalogue and guidance for indexing the collection. His legacy will be a lasting imprint in the meta data of the platform.
We continue to publish our blog series, including deep dives into digital Holocaust memory projects from around the world in our ‘Spotlight’ series (for example this one on Auschwitz and this one on Dachau) and our social media presence is growing steadily. Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram and please comment, tag us and share your work with us if you think we should know about it.