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Beyond the Single Story, Part 2

by Austin Xie, International Junior Research Associate, The University of Chicago, in conversation with Prof Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Austin Xie has spent two months at the Landecker Digital Memory Lab on the University of Sussex’s International Junior Research Associates (IJRA) programme. He tells us about what he’s learned and elaborates on the design of his own Holocaust-themed game, along with the ethical challenges he encountered. Dr Victoria Richardson-Walden: you’ve been working on a practice-based research project considering the challenges and opportunities the medium of computer games might offer to Holocaust memory and education.  What did you learn from studying existing games? Austin Xie: The majority of Holocaust games fall into two categories: Nazi-killing games, and what I’d consider more Holocaust memory games than Holocaust games. They take place after the Holocaust, and usually involve a character trying to uncover the story of a relative by investigating artefacts or talking to people. Their gameplay is that of remembering the Holocaust, rather than the Holocaust itself. Games other than the Nazi-killing ones circumvent the problem of a Holocaust victim/survivor game through a variety of strategies, like setting the game after the Holocaust, creating a fictional world that is an allegory for the [...]

By |2024-11-28T11:16:26+00:0018 September 2024|
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AI and the Future of Holocaust Memory

by Prof Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, in conversation with Dr Mykola Makhortykh and Maryna Sydorova In November, Mykola Makhortykh and Maryna Sydorova from the University of Bern will join the Landecker Digital Memory Lab as visiting researchers. In this interview, our Director, Dr Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden discusses a core focus of their research with them: AI and Holocaust memory. Dr Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden: We're really looking forward to hosting you here in the autumn semester. Mykola, we have of course worked closely together on a number of ventures over the past few years. Your and Maryna's research explores the significance of algorithm organisation of memory culture online. What first inspired you to recognise the significance of algorithms more broadly, and AI more specifically, in relation to Holocaust memory? Mykola Makhortykh: Like it often happens in the creative process, my inspiration for studying the significance of algorithms and AI for Holocaust memory originates in frustration. Back in the day, when I was doing my PhD on the platformisation of Second World War memory in Ukraine, I relied primarily on qualitative methods. However, at some point, it became obvious that I had more data than I could realistically process qualitatively. I [...]

By |2024-11-28T11:16:34+00:0011 September 2024|
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Listening in Latin America: Digital Holocaust Memory and Education in Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador

by Dr Kate Marrison Research fellow Dr Kate Marrison recently returned from Lima where she held a roundtable discussion with professionals working in the field of Holocaust education from Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador. This is what she found out. While there is a proliferation of scholarly interest in the digital development of Holocaust commemoration and education across Europe and the US, little attention has been paid to this work in Latin America. Last month the Memory Studies Association annual conference took place in Lima, so we took the opportunity to bring together colleagues to discuss their work within Holocaust organisations in Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Perú. To kick off, I asked contributors what digital interventions they had brought to their organisations and what are the challenges and opportunities they bring. Participants discussed some fascinating examples of their practice. They included a virtual tour of Museo del Holocausto de Buenos Aires and the first survivor interactive biography to be recorded in Spanish as part of the Dimensions in Testimony (DiT) project in collaboration with The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah. Examples from Brazil included open-access online educational materials created by Museu [...]

By |2024-11-28T11:17:01+00:0022 August 2024|
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Centralising the Human in Digital Humanities Methods

It has always been a challenge for researchers to capture 'collective memory'. As Holocaust memory becomes more digital, this aim becomes even harder. Here, our Lab Director, Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, introduces the approach we've adopted in designing a methodology to record content for our groundbreaking 'living database-archive'.

By |2024-11-28T11:17:08+00:0016 August 2024|
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Holocaust Education and Social Media: What Young People Really Think 

by Dr Kate Marrison Dr Marrison reports from a recent event which brought together young people from across the UK to further their understanding of the Holocaust and its contemporary relevance.  We’re familiar with the pros and cons of social media, but what role can it play in Holocaust education, memorialisation and commemoration? This was the topic of a workshop I ran this month in London with an audience of 30 16-to 25 year olds at the Holocaust Educational Trust’s annual Ambassador Conference (AmCon). The Ambassadors come from across the UK and from a range of backgrounds. The initiative tasks young people to be ‘the driving force’ behind efforts to make sure that British people understand and remember the Holocaust.  Holocaust survivors and other educators were also present.  The workshop explored how museums, memorial sites and professional memory institutions harness social media. We kicked off with a quiz asking which were the most popular social media platforms they engage with – Instagram, Tiktok and Snapchat – and which three words describe their thoughts about social media being used for Holocaust education.  Attitudes varied from those optimistic about the potential of social media (‘educational’, ‘important’ and ‘useful’), to those who expressed [...]

By |2024-11-28T11:17:22+00:001 August 2024|
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Beyond the Single Story: How Computer Games can Transform Holocaust Education

by Austin Xie, International Junior Research Associate, The University of Chicago Austin Xie is spending two months with us here at the Landecker Digital Memory Lab as part of the University of Sussex’s International Junior Research Associates (IJRA) programme. Here, in the first of two blogs, he tells us about himself and his plans. I’ve loved games my whole life. In elementary school, that meant the imagination games I played with friends and our own innovation of freeze tag (’freeze or tag’ — freeze everyone, or pass it on). In middle and high school, it became the video games we played and those we fantasized about designing. So later, at the University of Chicago, it was a magical moment for me to see and take Critical Videogame Studies as part of my English major—and shortly after, cross-listing it with my newly declared second major: Media Arts and Design (MAAD), with a ‘cluster focus’ in games. That same kind of magic manifested in my eyes during my first Zoom meeting with Dr. Victoria Grace Walden, here at University of Sussex in the Landecker Digital Memory Lab, when she said I could work with games. She noticed that ‘look’ instantly. That magic comes from the things [...]

By |2024-11-28T11:17:29+00:0025 July 2024|
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Shaping the Future Use of VR, AR and Computer Games in Holocaust Memory

by Dr Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden As more Holocaust institutions feel emboldened to incorporate digital media into their practices, it is increasingly urgent that there are clear guidelines to help shape their thinking. In response to this urgency, the new Landecker Digital Memory Lab has arrived and begins by publishing the final two recommendation reports  of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project's previous work. They offer guidelines for a more sustainable approach to using virtual and augmented reality, and computer games for Holocaust memory and education. The latest reports mark the completion of the set, which broadly looked at digital interventions in Holocaust memory and education (read the other recommendations here, which cover AI and machine learning, digitising material evidence, social media and digitally recording, recirculating and remixing Holocaust testimony). The reports ask provocative questions of those responsible for the future of Holocaust memory: major tech companies, policymakers, academia, and Holocaust museums, memorials and archives. Key recommendations from the two latest reports, ‘Virtualising Holocaust Memoryscapes’ and ‘Gaming and Play’ include: conduct thorough research into the impact of digital Holocaust projects establish technology working groups to help propel development in this field create spaces to share knowledge and ideas provide training and support [...]

By |2024-11-28T11:17:37+00:0011 July 2024|
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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|
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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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