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 |2024-11-11T15:21:35+00:0024 March 2022|

Holocaust Commemoration: Between Digital and Physical Spaces – An Online Discussion

On Thursday, September 24th 2020, speakers from Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme Memorials contributed to an online discussion about the relationship between digital and physical spaces for Holocaust commemoration.

By |2024-11-11T15:45:54+00:0024 September 2020|

Digital Holocaust Memory – Online Discussion

On Wednesday 15th July 2020, we invited a series of academics who work on digital Holocaust memory in different ways to discuss their research. You can see each of their presentations below: Imogen Dalziel is in the final stages of her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, investigating how the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has adapted to the digital museum. Under normal circumstances, she is also part-time Administrator for the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway; a freelance Educator for the Holocaust Educational Trust; and a volunteer for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Over the last academic year, Imogen has also co-taught undergraduate modules on the history of the Holocaust at The University of Birmingham.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0eamOxfcsQ   Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls is a Professor of Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigation and Director of the Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University. Her research in digital Holocaust memory centres on the role of non-invasive survey techniques in the location, documentation and visualization of Holocaust landscapes. As a field archaeologist, she has completed the first archaeological surveys and 3D visualisations of the former extermination and labour camps in Treblinka (Poland), the sites pertaining to the slave labour programme in Alderney (the Channel [...]

By |2024-11-11T14:38:25+00:0024 July 2020|
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