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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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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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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 |2024-11-08T15:51:51+00:0011 September 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 |2024-11-08T17:45:26+00:0025 July 2024|
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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 [...]

By |2024-11-11T15:36:32+00:0012 February 2021|
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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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