This image shows a central focus on a speaker in a blue jacket presenting at a podium, surrounded by a collage of smaller images, including group discussions, panels, online meetings, and collaborative activities.

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 analogue and digital materialities in film, with just one chapter on a mobile, digital project.

Two years into the PhD, I attended the British Association of Holocaust Studies’ conference and was struck by a number of papers exploring different digital memory cultures, from LegoBrick Films on YouTube (animations about the Holocaust using Lego, which I later wrote about) to interactive kiosks in museums.

I was desperate to keep the conversations going – I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to all these wonderful people at the end of the conference. So I established a series of online symposia long before Zoom.

These were humble meetings that brought people from across global time zones together on (an unstable) platform to share research about digital media, popular culture and Holocaust memory.

Later, post-PhD, I was invited to give the keynote at the EHRI conference in Amsterdam – it was now clear that there were a huge number of digital projects happening in our field across the world. Yet, during the reception when I referred to one app based in the city – Anne’s Amsterdam – a colleague involved with the project said ‘oh, I don’t think that works anymore’.

That made me wonder: what are we doing with all the content and all the expertise involved in such projects, which have now vanished from visibility due to software updates? Are we really taking seriously the consequences of digital loss and digital obsolescence for the future of Holocaust memory?

I wondered: are we really taking seriously the consequences of digital loss and digital obsolescence for the future of Holocaust memory?

Yet again, refusing to say goodbye to wonderful people, I contacted several delegates from the conference and proposed a bid for the Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Leadership Award – a now defunct scheme that allowed new scholars to lead a project with non-academic partners.

My aim was simple: to run a series of in-person co-creation workshops with various stakeholders – survivors, school children, heritage experts and tech professionals – to tackle some of the crises facing us as we attempt to ‘go digital’ with Holocaust memory and education.

These would run in several countries, including the US, Australia, Serbia and the Netherlands. Alongside the workshops, I would explore the different digital projects at each partner site.

My luck in bringing people together to partner on the project was countered by the date on which I submitted the bid – 16 March 2020. A few days later, the Covid lockdowns hit the UK and by that time, they had already been introduced in most other countries. No one was going to be travelling to in-person workshops anytime soon.

More questions than answers

The grant application got amazing feedback, but unsurprisingly was not funded. I have an immunodeficiency, so was told to shield – which in the UK, meant not leaving my then basement flat for months, not even for daily exercise or shopping.

I, like many of you I’m sure, was desperate for human contact. So I found a way to do the research without the funding or the extensive global travel (while meeting my need for human contact!).

2020 was also a significant year for Holocaust commemoration – the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camps. Now, memorial sites were cancelling their in-person plans and frantically trying to find ways to do things remotely. –We needed to all be in contact more than ever.

From April that year, I ran a series of 10 online discussions over 12 months on issues that included the way museums were handling Covid; academic concerns; the meeting of physical and digital spaces for commemoration; digital archives; computer games (both with academics and then creators); virtual memoryscapes; social media; and the alt-right and distortion online. The discussions led to the development of a mailing list of more than 1000 people. But each discussion seemed to raise more questions than answers.

In the middle of the online discussion series, I got sepsis and needed a break but was reluctant to reschedule events. I knew a great PhD student who had recently submitted a blog on Call of Duty for the project website, whose research was focused on digital witnessing and the Holocaust and she kindly stepped in to chair the Virtual Memoryscapes session – this was Kate Marrison.

Using the interdisciplinary lens of the online discussions I adopted the same logic to: Digital Memory, Education and Research and The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age. These edited collections brought together tech and creative experts, heritage professionals, activists and academics.

The next step was to produce the ‘co-creation’ part of the initial project, but online. With funding from the Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account which enabled me to bring Kate on board, this 18-month project led to the creation of 6 recommendations reports and brought together approximately 120 professionals covering a range of expertise.

International fieldwork

Alongside this work, I secured another award for fieldwork from the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant. This enabled me to record walkthroughs of digital projects across Europe, the US and Australia and interviews with those involved in the projects.

This early scoping work took me to the USC Shoah Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bergen-Belsen Memorial, Dachau Memorial, Arolsen Archives, Neuengamme Memorial, Falstadsentret, Auschwitz Jewish Centre, Anne Frank House, JoodsMonument, Westerbork, Mauthausen, Terraforming, and the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.

It was now 2022. and I had accumulated two key data sets:

  • The walkthroughs and interviews, which felt so valuable to the sector, more needed to be done with them than just use them for analysis purposes.
  • The reports that were in development, which highlighted a number of urgent actions.

It felt important to make a research intervention to allow these interviews and walkthroughs to serve development in Holocaust memory and education organisations, and to lead an action plan to address the recommendations our stakeholders had contributed to.

It was mid-fieldwork that I made contact with Steffen Jost at the Alfred Landecker Foundation – now our funders.

In 2023, Kate and I received funding from the Higher Education Innovation Fund which allowed us to run some pilot activities which will now become essential to the Lab’s objectives and responded directly to the recommendation reports:

  • A sharing hub for those working on digital projects to share resources created in collaboration with iRights.Lab, Germany’s Digital Collective Memory Platform.
  • A design sprint, held in collaboration with colleagues from the Alfred Landecker Foundation at the Dachau Memorial.
  • An online learning module on social media and Holocaust memory.

Today, each of these early activities has directly influenced the core work areas of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab:

  • Publications and wider research activities will continue to underpin everything that we do. This year, for example, we have been working on research related to computer games, algorithms on TikTok, and AI and Holocaust memory.
  • The Living database-archive will collect the walkthroughs and interviews, making these instantly accessible in a secure environment to those working on or researching digital Holocaust memory projects to make sure professionals  learn from existing practice and not feel like they are ‘reinventing the wheel’.
  • Policy and funding engagement formalises the early work of the project by strategically interacting with key organisations. We held our first such workshop last June together with the United Nations and Holocaust Outreach Programme. The related report will be published soon.
  • Digital Memory Dialogues continues the ethos of the online discussions held during the Pandemic, but these will now be curated around specific questions.
  • Training modules develop upon the pilot we ran in 2023. We learned a lot from feedback and aim to fulfil participants’ ambitious suggestions.
  • A consultancy service like our policy and funding engagement formalises work we were already doing but importantly, this is not totally free thanks to our funding. It also means we can reach out to smaller institutions and teams just starting to deal with the Holocaust digitally.

Long gone are the days of hiding in a basement flat only able to talk to others via Zoom. We’re not only taking our work out to the world via digital media. We’re also particularly looking forward to introducing our work with a series of live events, including co-creation design sprints in five countries.

The design sprints develop upon the pilot we ran at the Dachau Memorial in 2023 and we are glad to be hosting these with international partners, as was intended with the original bid in 2020.

Another valuable opportunity to bring people together in-person is through our large-scale international ‘Expo’ taking place in June 2025 at University of Sussex, then in Germany and Serbia.

Most importantly for us, these events provide the chance to learn, share, connect and co-design digital Holocaust memory futures.

The outcomes of all of these projects alongside our lengthy proposal gave the Alfred Landecker Foundation confidence that we could run the Lab for the next five years, developing on this extensive scoping work to ensure a more sustainable approach to Holocaust memory in the digital age.

Want to know more?

Building the Lab – Part 3: Our Official Launch – Landecker Digital Memory Lab

Building a Digital Holocaust Memory Lab, Part 2:  Defining Our Values – Landecker Digital Memory Lab

Building a Digital Holocaust Memory Lab, Part 1 – Landecker Digital Memory Lab