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 about the potential ‘newness’ or distinctions of an emerging platform or technology. These projects seem to ask: how might a particular medium support new approaches to Holocaust memory and education?
Some examples of digital Holocaust memory in the experimental phase would be:
Social Media:
The Facebook page for Henio Zytomirski – a famous Jewish child victim from Lublin, Poland. Posts on the page would shift between the third-and first-person. Users could ‘poke’ Henio and share messages on his wall, from virtual gifts to invitations to play online games. The profile was launched by Grodzka Gate-NN Teater in Lublin and experimented with the possibilities of Facebook in its early days. Yet, it also violated the platform’s rules by creating a profile of someone no longer alive. The project did echo an earlier non-digital campaign led by Grodska Gate called ‘Letters to Henio’, in which school children would write to him. The transition to Facebook, however, allowed them to explore the different ways young people might communicate with him through social media.
Virtual Reality:
In 2014, Future Memory Foundation, SPECS Lab and Eodyne released the ‘Spaces of Memory’ installation and app at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. This project was led by a research team building on Prof. Paul Verschure’s neuroscience research, which demonstrates not only the significance of experimental learning but the effect of spatial contextualisation of objects and information on (recall) memory. ‘Spaces of Memory’ combined models of the camp’s structures with snippets from testimonies and photographs for learners to find by navigating to pinpoints on an Augmented or Virtual Reality presentation of the site, whilst located at the actual former concentration camp. The project has led to the development of several further AR and VR apps at other sites across Europe.
Other projects have made use of Head-Mounted Displays and hand controllers to think through ways to let users explore historical spaces, experimenting with how to allow the user to interact with objects and get a visceral sense of small hiding spaces, whilst maintaining a historical distance. See for example Lipke Bunker VR (Žanis Lipke Memorial, Latvia) and Anne Frank House VR (Anne Frank House).
Augmented Reality:
Whilst it has become quite common place to use AR technologies to situate historical photographs where they were taken, Dachau Memorial’s ARt app uses the same framework (from ZaubAR, Germany) adopted for its photo-based Liberation app to place the artwork of survivors and their family in locations throughout the memorial. The mix of different types of artworks and occasional interactive elements suggests this was very much an experimentation of what is possible, and much discussion was had between memorial staff and the creative and technical team at ZaubAR about limitations and ethical boundaries. The content includes a powerful drawing of rollcall, which the user can walk through; an interactive through which the user can change the costume of a drawn priest into a concentration camp prisoner, and a comic strip of the arrival process.
AI/ Machine Learning:
Circa 2021-22, the idea of ‘chatbots’ seemed to pique the interest of a number of Holocaust organisations. Arolsen Archives, Germany published ‘Marbles of Remembrance’ a so-called ‘chatbot’-led tour of children’s stories of the Holocaust in Berlin via Telegram. The ‘Houses of Darkness’ project, for which the memorials at Falstad, Norway; Westerbork, the Netherlands; and Bergen-Belsen, partnered, has an online ‘chatbot’ at the core of its website. Yet, these two examples demonstrate the active ‘digital imagination’ in the Holocaust sector, for whilst they both look like ‘chatbots’ at the interface, they do not actually make use of AI technologies.
Computer Games:
Charles Games, Prague have arguably adopted the most experimental approach to games about the Holocaust and Nazi Occupation. With Attentat 1942, they combined photo-realist, cinematic interactive scenes with mini-games, often presented in a more comic-book style animation. The game jumps between the photo-realist present day and animated mini-games situated in the past. Another of their games, Train to Sachsenhausen uses the ‘swipe left’, ‘swipe right’ logic of contemporary dating apps to encourage users to make choices in historical scenarios.
The Future Projects Department:
The Future Projects Department at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (the USHMM) is another example of digital Holocaust memory working in an experimental phase. The team have the resource to work on prototypes, carry out user testing, and consider a variety of approaches to using digital (and other) technologies for the sake of Holocaust memory and education without the pressure of releasing every project to the public.
Dachau Memorial’s ARt app includes a powerful drawing of rollcall, which the user can walk through; an interactive through which the user can change a character’s costume into a concentration camp prisoner’s, and a comic strip of the arrival process.
Normative Phase
This phase recognises how digital media can be adopted to remediate pre-digital approaches to curatorial or pedagogical practices and/or broadcast media logics, for example the ‘one to the masses’ opposed to the ‘networked’ communication model. It often highlights moments when digital projects are professionalised within institutions (although not always), so this might refer to social media being co-opted by communication departments rather than ran by enthusiastic educators or larger-scale investment being contributed to digital teams (although this is still very rare globally). More commonly, it recognises that organisations are hesitant about the connective and computational possibilities of ‘the digital’ and prefer to maintain well-established norms in Holocaust memory and education with which they are familiar.
Some examples of digital Holocaust memory in the normative phase are:
Social Media:
The USHMM is one of many institutions whose social media is managed by a communications department. Alongside the Auschwitz Memorial and Yad Vashem, they remains one of the most popular Holocaust organisations on social media. The USHMM’s most common posts tend to present text presenting a historical narrative, sometimes a quotation, and usually a photograph or link. This form replicates the displays boards commonly seen in physical exhibition spaces and is commonly seen across Holocaust organisation social media accounts. Alongside such posts, we also often see others advertising upcoming events or presenting ‘behind-the-scenes’ videos with curators (as posted by the Neuengamme Memorial).
Whilst Holocaust organisations attempted to be more participatory and interactive on social media during Covid, they tended to simulate non-digital forms of engagement, for example, by presenting ‘micro’ guided tours via Instagram.
Virtual Reality:
The most common adoption of VR in Holocaust museums, especially those situated far away from actual sites of Holocaust violence, is to present 360-degree films of survivor testimonies. These often consist of the user following a survivor through various sites from their past, sometimes these films include historical scenes but more often than not they focus on places as they are today. These include The Last Goodbye (USC Shoah Foundation), the various films screened in The Journey Back: VR Experience (Illinois Holocaust Museum) and Walk with Me (Melbourne Holocaust Museum). As they are usually promoted as films, such VR experience tend to require use of a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) only – no hand controllers. (You can read our blog on the latter here.)
AI and Machine Learning:
The flagship machine learning project in Holocaust memory is arguably the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony. The project uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to retrieve responses from a 5-day recording with a Holocaust survivor triggered by written or verbal prompts from a user. The creators behind the project have long argued that it does not intend to radically alter how we do Holocaust memory and education, rather it hopes to continue what they consider to be traditional tenets:
- testimony as storytelling
- storytelling as a dialogue.
It is important to note that the system is heavily supervised by humans across the various locations in which it has now been installed and within the USC Shoah Foundation.
Games:
Computers games have been the biggest taboo for Holocaust organisations. In our research, several professionals have stated that their ‘red line’ for engaging with digital media is ‘gamification’ (although this term is not always fully understood). Thus, we tend to see two norms emerging: the first is simulating the logics of physical exhibitions in gaming spaces (see for example The USHMM’S Kristallnacht exhibition in Second Life and Voices of the Forgotten in Fortnite). The second is to create interactive stories, with limited player choice (for example the UK’s National Holocaust Centre’s Journey app(once described as a ‘interactive story’ and specifically not a ‘game’, it is now advertised as ‘a highly interactive refugee story game’, and Light in the Darkness). What is particularly interesting regards Voices of the Forgotten and Light in the Darkness is that they are industry-led projects not created from within the Holocaust sector, yet early pressure put on the games’ creator Luc Bernard by organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League have encouraged him to ‘play by the rules’ demonstrate by Holocaust organisations to help get the format of games taken more seriously in the sector (as discussed in our Recommendations for Computer Games and Play).
Computers games have been the biggest taboo for Holocaust organisations. In our research, several professionals have stated that they are their ‘red line’ for engaging with digital media.
Connective Phase
This final phase speaks to examples where organisations recognise that both offline and online they are connected to other memory actors, both human and non-human. Projects that are demonstrative of the connective phase tend to be more open to working directly with platforms, recognise the productiveness of open source and open data, acknowledge that digital media engagement is always socio-technical, or are more open to engaging with users in ways that considers them participants in memory production.
Some examples of digital Holocaust memory in the connective phase include:
Social Media:
The World Jewish Congress and UNESCO’s #WeRemember campaign saw them coordinate offline with major social media platforms to not only help promote the campaign with sponsorship for boosted posts, but also to integrate an overlay of content on top of users’ posts that mentioned any array of words associated with the Holocaust (including terms frequently used by denialists) which would link to their website www.aboutholocaust.org.
Concentration camp TikTok accounts, for example Neuengamme Memorial and Mauthausen Memorial, are another example of a shift towards the connective phase. No longer using social media in a broadcast way, these accounts speak directly to users, sometimes creating ‘duets’ and ‘stitches’ with others, sometimes creating posts that respond to a specific user’s query. Perhaps most important in terms of ‘connectivity’ regarding these accounts is that they were developed as part of the TikTok Shoah Commemoration and Education Initiative – a partnership between American Jewish Committee Berlin, TikTok Germany, the Hebrew University or Jerusalem, PARTNERS PARTNERS & COMPANY, and Werk21, and the Holocaust organisations that took part in workshops about making use of the platform’s affordances in their work.
Crowdsourcing:
A range of projects take advantage of crowdsourcing including #EveryNameCounts (Arolsen Archives), Library of Lost Books, JoodsMonument, and History Unfolded (the USHMM). Yet, the extent to which archival agency is redistributed with each is different. For example, #EveryNameCounts and History Unfolded provide clear guidance to users about how to support the project’s aims and content is reviewed by moderators. In contrast, JoodsMonument has a minimal moderation process, trusting users to upload appropriate content.
Open data and open source:
www.verbrannte-orte.de is one of the few Nazi-era related projects which publicly celebrates its use of open data, and its producers are strong advocates for others to do the same. The project licenses its geodata under the ‘Open Database License’ under the ‘Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike 4.0 International license’ (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). It uses OpenStreetMap and its OSM Tile Proxy is open source . This open approach offers the possibility for others to use the infrastructure and/or data from this project to develop new ones, avoiding the need to reinvent the wheel, so often a concern of organisations. It demonstrates a rare example of a Holocaust memory project foregrounding computational connectivity.
Blockchain:
Whilst not obvious at the interface, USC Shoah Foundation makes use of blockchain technologies to store its data and to minimise loss in digital files. So, often preservation of digital content is overlooked in funding grants and project plans, but computational logics like this can offer robust approaches if adopted securely.
Want to know more?
Building a Digital Holocaust Memory, Part 1