Earlier in 2024, the University of Sussex (UK) launched the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. This five-year project’s core aim is to enhance digital literacies and capacities in the Holocaust ‘sector’ (museums, memorials, archives and libraries) to ensure that Holocaust memory and education are fully equipped for the digital age. But why might we need such an intervention?
Every story of recent digital practice seems to be traceable back to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in some ways, this one is no different. On the one hand, this is the period which some identify as the moment when concentration camp memorials (particularly in Germany) started being more experimental with social media (Ebbrecht-Hartmann 2021). However, some of these memorial sites had already been leading the field in terms of onsite digital applications, such as Here: Bergen-Belsen, Spaces of Memory (Bergen-Belsen Memorial, active since 2012) and there were also many more established projects worldwide (see for example the work of USC Shoah Foundation). The Pandemic exposed the unevenness of digital literacies and capacities in the sector – whilst some organisations had to rapidly ‘pivot’ to find innovative ways to engage audiences, others simply circulated reminders of their existing digital content via social media. On the other hand, it was during the first UK lockdown that my own research into digital Holocaust memory evolved from an, at least temporarily, doomed project reliant on substantial international travel (impossible during the Pandemic) to the creation of a blog and a series of online discussions, which led to co-creation workshops with more than 120 international participants focused on developing recommendations for digital interventions in Holocaust memory and education (Walden and Marrison et al., 2023a, b, c, d and 2024a, b).
Digital Holocaust memory is almost as old as the World Wide Web, with major Holocaust institutions such as Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (the USHMM), and the Anne Frank House creating virtual exhibitions and CD-ROM projects since the 1990s and early 2000s. The earliest social media projects by institutions were also rather experimental, including the creation of Facebook pages for Holocaust victims (Grodska Gate, Poland), ‘Tweetup’ tours (the USHMM), and live Twitter debates enhancing in-person events (The Wiener Library, UK). Soon, however, there was a trend across the sector for social media to be succumb to formal communication and marketing strategies. Thus, content became relatively standardised across the board (often without explicit collaboration between institutions). This materialised into a common approach: posts that augmented curatorial activity, e.g., they include a historical photograph or video with narrative text contextualising it similar to what one might experience in the physical exhibition space, or posts advertising the activities of the institution, occasionally with spotlights on staff or working process, including behind-the-scenes looks at curatorial activities. It might be more accurate to describe the Pandemic’s experimental, participatory, and hyper-connective practices as a ‘blip’. At least we seem to have returned to these standardised practices on social media. This is unsurprising given that resources dedicated to more participatory activities online during COVID-19 have been diverted back to onsite needs.
Simultaneous to this return to standardised practice as the dominant mode of institutional memory on social media has been a ‘shake-up’ of the industry more broadly. Twitter – once a bastion for hashtag-led communication – has now been abandoned by many Holocaust organisations since Elon Musk’s takeover and its transformation into X; its more mature and professional audience now spread thinly across BlueSky, Threads, and Mastodon; short-form video content has increased on Instagram and YouTube through mechanisms designed as direct competition to market forerunner TikTok. Whilst the latter platform is the place to reach younger generations, its algorithmic-led curation means professional Holocaust memory content now reaches a much more widespread and random audience, and with that comes more denial, distortion, trivialisation and hate directly experienced by those working in Holocaust organisations. This is so prevalent and has notably increased since October 7th, 2023, that prominent Holocaust survivor-cum-TikTok-influencer Gidon Lev temporarily abandoned his account in late 2023 when his young, activist community of fans turned against him simply for being Israeli and sharing his personal experiences of the Israel-Gaza war.
Beyond social media, the work of the Future Memory Foundation and SPECS Lab has informed thoroughly-researched design work into Virtual – and Augmented- Reality experiences with historical sites across Europe since the initiation of Spaces of Memory at Bergen-Belsen covering sites from Norway, through Germany, Spain, Croatia, and Czechia. Yet, in parallel to their efforts which foreground spatial, experiential learning (Verschure and Wieregena 2021), a plethora of survivor-led narrative VR productions have been disseminated in newly designated VR rooms in Holocaust museums, mostly at sites detached from Holocaust history (e.g., Illinois Holocaust Museum and Melbourne Holocaust Museum). These latter examples limit the user’s interactivity, requiring them to watch a pre-recorded 360-degree film. On the one hand, such projects suggest that Holocaust museums perceive virtual reality as essential to the future of visitor engagement. On the other hand, they hesitate to engage with the interactive potentials of such digital technologies. Indeed, research interviews we have recorded, and the co-creation workshops we held illustrate fears stretching from the challenges of technologically onboarding visitors to concerns about the ethics of allowing them to interact with historical and/or commemorative places virtually, as well as concerns regarding overwhelming users through an immersive experience.
Computer games, once taboo, have become the next ‘hot topic’ in digital Holocaust memory. Once institutions would be cautious about using the term ‘game’, preferring ‘interactive story’, as seen with the UK’s National Holocaust Centre’s Journey app, in the past year or so, we have seen the development of a game to support engagement with the #LastSeen research project, another Remember. The Children of Bullenhuser Damm with The Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centres Commemorating the Victims of Nazi Crimes and Paintbucket Games, and the creation of a Holocaust museum in Fortnite, as well as new Nazi-era related games from Paintbucket and Charles Games – two producers with a history in this field. Still, there is a tendency to position the player in contemporary times looking back into history to learn more about the past or to decentre the Jewish experience (except in the game Light in the Darkness by the same commercial creator as the Fortnite Holocaust Museum). Yet the creator of Light in the Darkness and the Fortnite project, Luc Bernard, tends to publicly position his work as a challenge to traditional Holocaust education.
The Dachau Memorial in Germany has worked closely with the German startup ZAUBAR to experiment with the potential of AR technology first to locate liberation photographs on site (in the Liberation app initiated by the Munich-based broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk) and then to bring survivors and their relative’s artwork into the memorial space with AR.
These, projects though, like many, have faced challenges: different right permissions given for digital publishing from private archives (compared to the permissions granted for the use of the same photographs in their permanent exhibition), the impact of short-term funding schemes restricting the resources available to maintain digital applications, further develop them and update with new material, and to carry out long-term impact studies and design substantial pedagogical contexts for their use. Furthermore, visitors without EU data plans can struggle to connect to the local Wi-Fi to download the apps onto their mobile devices (as observed during our research visit in 2022). Practice at Dachau and across many other Holocaust sites illustrates the vast and enthusiastic ‘digital imagination’ in the sector challenged by the lack of support for infrastructure and resources (including staffing, time and money) to ensure sustainable digital interventions. Several participants we have worked with in our research have expressed a need to share practice and experiences, too, as they often feel like they are ‘reinventing the wheel’ despite other institutions having previously worked through the same challenges on similar projects.
Digital Holocaust memory is facing a sustainability crisis which needs to be urgently addressed lest the increasing mainstream visibility of online denial, distortion, trivialisation, and hate subsume it.
The Landecker Digital Memory Lab is not simply an incubator or funder for more small-scale digital Holocaust memory projects; we aim to take a global, cross-sector and interdisciplinary approach. We aim to help the sector be more sustainable at scale – at institutional, national and international levels. To do this, we are adopting a multi-pronged approach that seeks to target academic researchers, professionals working within Holocaust organisations, creative and tech industry professionals, policymakers, and funders.
At the core of our activities is the development of a ‘living database archive’. This ambitious platform will host walkthroughs of digital Holocaust projects complemented by interviews with those involved in their creation from within the Holocaust sector and beyond. This intervention aims to offer quick access for Holocaust professionals and academics to see what work has been done before and to listen to the diverse range of experiences, and the challenges and opportunities faced by of those involved in creating such projects.
Complementing this, we will soon launch an online publishing space. Seeking to challenge the traditions of paywall academic journals and disciplinary silos, ‘Digital Memory Dialogues’ will combine multimedia responses to thematic provocations, each curated from experts in different disciplines, who will then be invited to participate in a public, online discussion together.
Apart from continuing to produce world-leading academic resources, we will make use of our research findings discovered through recording the walkthroughs and interviews to inform a suite of online training courses for those working in Holocaust organisations focused on specific digital topics, such as AI and machine learning, VR and AR, or social media. We are also grateful that our funders – the Alfred Landecker Foundation – are supporting us to host a series of ‘innovation initiatives’ with global partners. These week-long, intensive workshops will bring together a diverse range of experts to solve some of the sector’s macro-level problems regarding digitalisation, such as connectivity across collections. We will complement these activities by offering a free advisory service to those institutions or projects desiring researchers to soundboard their development. The Landecker Digital Memory Lab’s new website will launch in November 2024. In the meantime, you can follow our work on our blog.
Our aim is that these activities build an ever-evolving network across a broad range of disciplines and sectors that take seriously the necessity to collaborate for digital Holocaust memory to be approached sustainably. We will invite this network to three major ‘expos’ throughout the project, hoping to strengthen and build new connections through in-person meetings. As positive as digital connectivity can be, intensive periods of working together in person are still incredibly valuable experiences – the best online work is usually informed by strong, offline connectivity.
Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Tobias: Commemoration From a Distance: The Digital Transformation of Holocaust Memory in Times of COVID-19, in: Media, Culture and Society, Jg. 43 (2021), H. 6, S. 1095–1112, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720983276.
Verschure, Paul.F.M.J/Wierenga, Sytse: Future Memory: A Digital Humanities Approach for the Preservation and Presentation of the History of the Holocaust and Nazi Crimes, in: Holocaust Studies, Jg. 28 (2021), H. 3, S. 331–357,DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2021.1979178.
Walden, Victoria Grace/Marrison, Kate, et al.: Recommendations for using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Holocaust Memory and Education, Sussex: REFRAME 2023a, URL: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/files/2023/01/AI-and-Machine-Learning-Guidelines.pdf.
Walden, Victoria Grace/Marrison, Kate, et al.: Recommendations for Digitising Material Evidence of the Holocaust, Sussex: REFRAME 2023b, URL: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/files/2024/07/Digitising-Material-Evidence-Guidelines-Digital-Holocaust-Memory-Project-2.pdf.
Walden, Victoria Grace / Marrison, Kate, et al.: Recommendations for Digitally Recording, Recirculation and Remixing of Holocaust Testimony, Sussex: REFRAME 2023c, URL: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/files/2023/01/Testimony-Guidelines.pdf.
Walden, Victoria Grace/Marrison, Kate, et al.: Recommendations for Using Social Media for Holocaust Memory and Education, Sussex: REFRAME 2023d, URL: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/files/2023/01/Social-Media-Guidelines.pdf.
Walden, Victoria Grace/Marrison, Kate, et al.: Recommendations for Virtualising Holocaust Memoryscapes, Sussex: REFRAME 2024a, URL: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/files/2024/07/Virtualising-Memoryscapes-Guidelines-Digital-Holocaust-Memory-Project-1.pdf.
Walden, Victoria Grace/Marrison, Kate, et al.: Recommendations for Creating Computer Games for Holocaust Memory and Education, Sussex: REFRAME 2024b, URL: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/files/2024/07/Games-Guidelines-Digital-Holocaust-Memory-Project-2.pdf.
