Abstract: Virtual reality and augmented reality experiences play an increasingly significant role in Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies into visitor and user experience. There is a rapidly expanding list of projects experimenting with cinematic virtual reality, photogrammetry, digital mapping, 3D modelling, 360-degree on-location survivor testimony as well as a growing portfolio of augmented and mixed reality mobile and tablet applications.
Principally being implemented as spatial technologies, several memorial sites and museums are exploring the possibilities of creating 3D graphic reconstructions of former sites of Nazi persecution in AR/VR such as the digital reconstruction of Falstad Concentration Camp, the Here: Spaces for Memory App at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site, the Sobibor AR exhibit, the project Auschwitz VR as well as the 360-degrees-walks at Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Going further, some digital initiatives are using VR/AR/MR technologies to zoom in on historical documents, testimonies and artefacts, notable projects include the ARt AR App at the Dachau Memorial Site and Museum which revivifies historical and contemporary drawings and paintings in-situ at the present-day site, the Anne Frank House VR which invites visitors to navigate the annex through a series of digital objects, and The Last Goodbye VR experience which foregrounds survivor testimony within Majdanek, the similarly survivor-driven Walk with Me at The Melbourne Holocaust Museum and numerous films that shape the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center’s The Journey Back exhibition space.
While it is important to note that VR technology is not new and has existed for more than 30 years, it is only recently that the technology has become more widely accessible in the heritage and museum sectors (in part, due to the affordability of headsets and devices in the domestic market). The proliferation of VR and AR projects within the sector, then, raises critical questions regards the opportunities for digital Holocaust memory practice and education while also bringing to the fore issues of curation, contextualisation, visitor experience and accessibility.
This report serves as an important first step in this work. It was created as part of the research project ‘Participatory Workshops – Co-Designing Standards for Digital Interventions in Holocaust Memory and Education’, which is one thread of the larger Digital Holocaust Memory Project at the University of Sussex. The participatory workshops project have focused on six themes, each of which brought together a different range of expertise to discuss current challenges and consider possible recommendations for the future.
The themes were:
AI and machine learning
Digitising material evidence
Recording, recirculating and remixing testimony
Social media
Virtual memoryscapes
Computer games
Abstract: In April 2005, the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands went online. This
monument is an Internet monument dedicated to preserving the memory of more than 100,000 men,
women and children, Dutch Jewish victims of the Shoah. As of September 2010, the interactive
Jewish Monument Community website has been linked to the website of the Digital Monument. The
main objective of the monument, and its community, is to reconstruct the picture of the Jewish
community in the Netherlands on the eve of their destruction by “returning” to each individual
victim his or her identity. With this monument, and its companion Community website, a new
approach to commemoration is introduced, characterized by the application of new concepts in
design, memorial space, and communication. My research on the practices engaged in, and the
meaning of this Digital Monument and the associated Community, has been a qualitative and
explorative exercise within the interdisciplinary field of memory studies and ritual studies.
Questionnaires, ninety in total, were returned by first-, second- and third-generation users and by
other users without any family connection to victims remembered on the monument.
The results of my research show that although practices are mostly limited in time they evoke deeply
felt emotions raised by the enormous number of names, the ages at which people were killed, and the
stories behind the victims. My research also shows that the characteristics Foot, Warnick & Schneider
put forward as being typical of web-based memorializing – co-production of memory and voice – are
indeed distinguishing features of the Digital Monument and its associated Community (Foot, Warnick
& Schneider 2006, 88–91). By sharing with the Community their own personal remembrances,
stories, pictures or other digitized objects, users are in effect co–producing the remembrance of the
Shoah. Each individual may decide, 24/7 and from all over the world, what they consider is
important to voice within the Community; the memorial refrains from taking sides or imposing
closure upon the audience’s interpretation of the memory of the Shoah. Expressing oneself in public
– in this case in a virtual environment – appears to have a healing effect (Casey 2004, 17–44; Savage
2009, 261–295).
