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How a Dislike of ‘Goodbyes’ Inspired Our Digital Holocaust Memory Programme
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How a Dislike of ‘Goodbyes’ Inspired Our Digital Holocaust Memory Programme

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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 Victoria Grace Walden|2024-12-02T09:53:16+00:0028 November 2024|

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 Victoria Grace Walden|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 Victoria Grace Walden|2024-11-28T11:23:23+00:003 November 2020|