The digital brings great opportunities to Holocaust memory, but also particular challenges as we move from an era dominated by face-to-face survivor testimony to what James Young has defined as an age characterised by mediated memory. As digital culture evolves as increasingly participatory networks, how do memory institutions find their place in this ever-expanding space?
Digital Holocaust Memory has three aims:
- To map the digital Holocaust memoryscape, including institutional and amateur projects
- To interrogate the ‘newness’ of digital Holocaust memory and understand it in relation to media, museum and memory histories as well as within contemporary digital logics and cultures
- To establish a network of heritage and archive professionals, academics, amateur and professional media producers, and digital audiences/users to explore potential digital futures for Holocaust memory together.
Digital Holocaust Memory aims to spark conversations which dismantle national, cultural and expert level silos. What happens when producers of popular media or amateur content online speak and work more closely with Holocaust institutions? What happens where we bring media studies to bear on Holocaust and genocide memory? What happens when we bring together people with different types of expertise across numerous nations? How can we negotiate the conventions of popular media with the solemness and seriousness of the Holocaust without distorting this past? Whilst Holocaust memory practices have influenced commemoration about other genocides, what can Holocaust memory and education learn from the way more recent tragedies have been marked? How might thinking through all of this help us futureproof digital interventions in this field?
On this site, you can access recordings of our online discussions with academics, and Holocaust educators, curators, archivists, and media practitioners working on projects representing this past. You can also follow the progress of our research and read guest posts in the blogs. If you want to get more involved with the network, you can participate in our Discord Server.
You can read the project’s third annual review (2022) here
News
Digital Holocaust Memory hosts numerous online events throughout the year, and its creator also makes public appearances. Find out what is happening soon on our news page.
Reflections on Digital Holocaust Memory can be found on our blog.
Recommendations Reports
Read the recommendations reports produced as part of our 2022 series of co-creation workshops, which brought together professionals from Holocaust organisations, and the tech and creative industries, and academics from diverse disciplines to identify recommendations for digital interventions in Holocaust memory and education in relation to four themes: AI and Machine Learning; Social Media; Digitising Material Evidence; and Recording, Recirculating, and Remixing Testimony.
Online Discussions
Catch up on the online discussions you’ve missed. From Holocaust memory during Covid to computer games, archives, commemorations between the digital and physical, and more, we have welcomed academics, and professionals working in Holocaust memory, education and research organisations to share their work.
Holocaust Digital Memory Reading List
In this ever-growing crowdsourced reading list, you can find recommendations for academic monograph, edited collection, and journal article related to this subject.
The Holocaust and Computer Games Discord Server
Towards the end of our first ‘Playing the Holocaust’ online discussion, there was much enthusiasm for continuing the conversation. We have created a Discord Server where we invite interested individuals to consider the many ethical, aesthetic, ludic and other issues related to creating computer games about the Holocaust.
Public and Academic Presentations
Here, we collect material related to presentations from Digital Holocaust Memory creator Dr Victoria Grace Walden. This includes video recordings alongside blog posts reflecting on talks and workshops.
Digital Holocaust Memory
A project led by Dr Victoria Grace Walden, University of Sussex.
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