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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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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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10 key implications for AI in Holocaust memory and education

by Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Our Lab Director has recently been engaging with delegates of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance about AI and Holocaust memory, tackling topics including mass digitisation of archival and historical material and the risks of distortion and disinformation. In this week’s blog she discusses what emerged from recent events organised by the IHRA, including our new policy briefing. I have had the pleasure to engage with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (the IHRA) on two occasions in the last few weeks because under their UK Presidency in 2024, it has decided to focus on the significance of AI for Holocaust memory and education. Firstly, I spoke at an online AI workshop with approximately 70 people, organised by the IHRA's Education Working Group. Then, this past weekend, I presented the opening paper at the conference ‘AI in the Holocaust Education, Research and Remembrance Sector’ at Lancaster House, London. My role at these events was really to set the scene for those who are policymakers and Holocaust education and history experts, but less savvy about emerging digital technologies. At the core of my presentations was the question: what are the implications of AI for Holocaust memory and education in [...]

By |2024-12-05T17:16:20+00:005 December 2024|
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How a Dislike of ‘Goodbyes’ Inspired Our Digital Holocaust Memory Programme

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The Landecker Digital Memory Lab is up and running, but how did we get to this point? How did it all begin?  The Director of the Lab gives her personal account of the events which led to the official launch event in London last week. I have a habit of not wanting to say goodbye to wonderful people when I meet them – this habit has served the Lab well. It’s always difficult trying to write an origin story because the way life twists and turns tends to make it difficult to identify a particular moment as pivotal. However, there are probably two moments that can be considered the origins of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab: The first British Association of Holocaust Studies Conference in 2014 held by the University of Southampton and University of Winchester. The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure’s (EHRI) Conference in 2019 held in Amsterdam, on the theme: ‘Holocaust Studies in the Digital Age. What’s New?’ During my PhD, I had wanted to explore the use of (digital) screens in Holocaust museums, but I was in a traditional film studies department, so this wasn’t possible. I settled on exploring the ‘intermedialities’ of [...]

By |2024-12-02T09:53:16+00:0028 November 2024|
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Building the Lab – Part 3: Our Official Launch

by Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, Director, Landecker Digital Memory Lab The Landecker Digital Memory has officially launched. To mark the pivotal moment, we held an event in London in front of a distinguished audience of academics, policymakers, Holocaust memorial sites and museums, educators, journalists, filmmakers, digital media creatives, politicians and Holocaust survivors and their descendants. After months of hard work establishing our team, aims, values, and starting to build the initiatives we are launching in 2025 and beyond, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab officially launched this week at the Imperial War Museum in London. We felt a real buzz in the room as attendees enjoyed a drinks reception, an exclusive review of our forthcoming policy guidance on AI and Holocaust memory, and had the opportunity to preview some of our walkthrough videos ahead of the launch next year of our living database-archive. All of our guests were invited to an ‘after hours’ private viewing of the Imperial War Museum’s award-winning Holocaust Galleries, following a fascinating introduction by its curator and the Museum’s Head of Public History, Dr James Bulgin. As I introduced our plans for the next five years, we were joined by an audience of more than 150 people [...]

By |2024-11-22T10:17:52+00:0022 November 2024|
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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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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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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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Contact

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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