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|

Finding Virtuality in Virtual Holocaust Museums

Lockdown is here again, for many of us. As museums, cultural and heritage centres close their doors again, this week’s blog reflects on what is a virtual museum, and offers various links to different experiences that you might want to ‘visit’ (in lieu of in-person trips) or share with students. What is ‘virtual’ about virtual museums? Virtuality is so frequently used interchangeably with digital, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish whether a museum – or indeed any other online experience – is trying to present itself as a virtual experience or a specifically digital one, or indeed both! Attempts to virtually transport users into photographic, videographic, or photogrammetry representations of physical museum sites can often feel like remediations of in-person experiences of visiting museums as we are offered limited navigational paths through the exhibits. The main difference is that online we move representations towards us by clicking on arrows or highlighted content rather than moving our bodies closer to them, as we do in the physical space. Whilst remediated experiences of physical exhibition spaces have become particularly popular during the pandemic, given we cannot see them in-person, there are many forms of virtual museums, some of which are digitally-born [...]

By |2024-11-11T15:44:53+00:003 November 2020|
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