Digital Holocaust memory

Building a Living Database, Part 1: Mapping the World’s Digital Holocaust Memory Projects
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Building a Living Database, Part 1: Mapping the World’s Digital Holocaust Memory Projects

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Building a Living Database, Part 1: Mapping the World’s Digital Holocaust Memory Projects

By Dr Kate Marrison, Research Fellow, Landecker Digital Memory Lab Today the Landecker Digital Memory Lab launches its digital map of global Holocaust memory, coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Research Fellow Dr Kate Marrison sets out its ambitious aims. This year marks a major milestone anniversary – 80 years since the end of the Second World War and thus, (more than) eight decades since the liberation of the camps. The UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s theme for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, ‘For a Better Future’ feels particularly pertinent as the Holocaust moves from an event in living history to forms of “mediated memory” (Young, 2000). Aligned with the Landecker Digital Memory Lab’s central mission of “ensuring a sustainable future for Holocaust memory in the digital age”, this moment offers an opportunity to look ahead and think critically about the possibilities of our digital futures. So, what does digital memory practice look like today and how might it shape Holocaust memory going forward? Listening across sectors After listening to more than 120 memory professionals, tech practitioners, educators, designers, curators, creatives and academics working in this field, we observed that the current digital Holocaust memoryscape is [...]

By Kate Marrison|2025-04-16T09:35:11+01:0015 April 2025|

Behind the Scenes at the Lab: What’s in the Works?
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Behind the Scenes at the Lab: What’s in the Works?

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Behind the Scenes at the Lab: What’s in the Works?

It’s been an extremely busy start to the year at the Lab. Find out what we’ve been up to behind the scenes as we approach an exciting new phase of our programme. We kicked off 2025 by welcoming a new member of the team. Research Fellow Dr Ben Pelling has an academic background in History and his previous postdoctoral role focused on the impact of digitisation on conspiracy theories across Europe. Last month, he presented some work in progress related to our living database archive at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab's Research Forum alongside some fascinating projects, including one about AI in music. Welcome Ben. We are very happy that you have joined the team. Holocaust Memorial Day Early February saw an excellent Holocaust Memorial Day programme hosted by University of Sussex, the first university in England to commemorate this annual event. Our Director Professor Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden took part in a discussion and Q&A with founder and president of the UK Jewish Film Festival Judy Ironside MBE focused on the screening of Letter to a Pig. The short film is an Oscar-nominated animation Letter to a Pig (watch the 'making of'), which explores a young girl's dream after listening to [...]

By Mel Poluck|2025-03-13T09:56:39+00:0013 March 2025|

Spotlight: Dachau Memorial
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Spotlight: Dachau Memorial

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Spotlight: Dachau Memorial

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The Director of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab reflects on how digitally-mediated experiences of Dachau Memorial rearrange the site’s meaning and affect for her. On arrival at KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, most visitors close the gate which reads ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ so they can take a photograph of the infamous slogan. There is no suggestion from the site’s curators or educators that this is a proposed activity at the site – indeed there is no invitation to ‘touch’ historical things (although the gate in-situ is a replica), yet most visitors feel compelled to do this – perhaps due to the iconicity of these three words. This now ritualistic behaviour is illustrative of the fact that however well ‘curated’ or ‘managed’ memorial sites seem to be, their role as memorial spaces and the meaning and relations relating to the past constructed there rely on the performativity of the multitude of different agents who come to occupy the place – however transiently. As I walked through the gate the first time during a 5-day research trip to the site, my eyes and thus my whole-bodily attention were draw to two things immediately: the guard tower across the roll call [...]

By Victoria Grace Walden|2025-02-26T17:26:23+00:0026 February 2025|

Building the Lab – Part 3: Our Official Launch
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Building the Lab – Part 3: Our Official Launch

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Building the Lab – Part 3: Our Official Launch

by Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, Director, Landecker Digital Memory Lab The Landecker Digital Memory has officially launched. To mark the pivotal moment, we held an event in London in front of a distinguished audience of academics, policymakers, Holocaust memorial sites and museums, educators, journalists, filmmakers, digital media creatives, politicians and Holocaust survivors and their descendants. After months of hard work establishing our team, aims, values, and starting to build the initiatives we are launching in 2025 and beyond, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab officially launched this week at the Imperial War Museum in London. We felt a real buzz in the room as attendees enjoyed a drinks reception, an exclusive review of our forthcoming policy guidance on AI and Holocaust memory, and had the opportunity to preview some of our walkthrough videos ahead of the launch next year of our living database-archive. All of our guests were invited to an ‘after hours’ private viewing of the Imperial War Museum’s award-winning Holocaust Galleries, following a fascinating introduction by its curator and the Museum’s Head of Public History, Dr James Bulgin. As I introduced our plans for the next five years, we were joined by an audience of more than 150 people [...]

By Victoria Grace Walden|2024-11-22T10:17:52+00:0022 November 2024|

Holocaust Education and Social Media: What Young People Really Think
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Holocaust Education and Social Media: What Young People Really Think

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Holocaust Education and Social Media: What Young People Really Think

by Dr Kate Marrison Dr Marrison reports from a recent event which brought together young people from across the UK to further their understanding of the Holocaust and its contemporary relevance. We’re familiar with the pros and cons of social media, but what role can it play in Holocaust education, memorialisation and commemoration? This was the topic of a workshop I ran this month in London with an audience of 30 16-to 25 year olds at the Holocaust Educational Trust’s annual Ambassador Conference (AmCon). The Ambassadors come from across the UK and from a range of backgrounds. The initiative tasks young people to be ‘the driving force’ behind efforts to make sure that British people understand and remember the Holocaust.  Holocaust survivors and other educators were also present. The workshop explored how museums, memorial sites and professional memory institutions harness social media. We kicked off with a quiz asking which were the most popular social media platforms they engage with – Instagram, Tiktok and Snapchat – and which three words describe their thoughts about social media being used for Holocaust education. Attitudes varied from those optimistic about the potential of social media (‘educational’, ‘important’ and ‘useful’), to those who expressed [...]

By Kate Marrison|2024-11-28T11:17:22+00:001 August 2024|