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2024: A Year in Review

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The year 2024 will be unforgettable to us, as the year we launched the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. We look back at what we’ve achieved. It was at a public lecture held at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in April that we were finally able to announce the Landecker Digital Memory Lab was coming into existence. Since then, we’ve been non-stop! My two-week residential at the museum also included co-hosting a symposium on ‘Preserving Truth in the Digital Age’ and led to us confirming the Melbourne Holocaust Museum as an official project partner. We’re looking forward to collaborating with them further. Read our ‘Spotlight’ piece on the museum to find out more about their digital work past and present. The Melbourne trip was followed in September by further fieldwork in Riga, Latvia at the Žanis Lipke Memorial where we explored their use of VR. Engagement with intergovernmental organisations, policymakers and funders was a dominant thread of our first few months, particularly with the hype about ‘AI’. In June, we hosted the workshop ‘Policy and Funding Sustainable Interventions in Digital Holocaust Memory and Education’ together with the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme. The event was attended by [...]

By |2025-01-13T09:27:29+00:008 January 2025|
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TikTok and Holocaust Memory: Where Commemoration and Algorithmic Culture Collide

by Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Our article ‘An Entangled Memoryscape: Holocaust Memory as Social Media’ was recently published in the academic journal Memory, Mind and Media. Here we summarise the key findings.   The article written by myself and my colleague Dr Kate Marrison questions the uncritical acceptance across Holocaust Studies that there has been a paradigmatic shift from the ‘era of the witness’ (Wieviroka 2006) to the ‘era of the user’ (Hogervost 2020). Instead, it adopts a post-humanist approach, working with the writing of Karen Barad (2007) to argue that social media engagements with the Holocaust should be understood through the lens of entanglement. What this means is that social media is ‘socio-technical’ (van Dijck 2013) – any ‘agency’ (although we prefer Barad’s word ‘actancy’) involved in its creation involves a multitude of human and non-human actors in an ongoing, iterative process embedded in a variety of social contexts. This includes the corporate platforms, their algorithms and ideologies, the content creators, the platform itself, and the users who comment, like and otherwise interact with shared content. Furthermore, it means that social media does not just produce Holocaust memory, but that Holocaust memory content on these platforms has the potential to [...]

By |2024-12-12T10:43:01+00:0012 December 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 |2024-11-28T11:16:34+00:0011 September 2024|
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Contact

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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