AVÊÓƵ

The Landecker Digital Memory Lab is up and running. 
 

With a packed programme over the next five years, we’ve already made some important inroads. 
 
It was back in April, at a public lecture in Melbourne that our Director Dr Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden announced that we’d secured funding from the  to set up a programme focused on sustaining digital Holocaust memory into the future. 

She was there for a two-week residency at the , collecting important interviews and walkthroughs for our ‘living database-archive’ (more on this later). Alongside her public lecture, she co-hosted, with Dr Anna Hirsch (Manager of Collections and Research at the museum), the symposium 

The Landecker Digital Memory Lab, based within the AVÊÓƵ’s School of Media, Arts and Humanities is led by Victoria, a world-leading international academic focused on digital Holocaust memory and education.  We build on the solid foundations of her previous  project. 

In June, she put together our team: 

• Kate Marrison, Research Fellow in Digital Memory  
• Philippa Murnaghan, Senior Project Officer
• Mel Poluck, PR and Communications Manager  
• Steve Wang, Digital Media Specialist 

Dr Kate MarrisonPhilippa MurnaghanMel PoluckSteve Wang

We come from a range of backgrounds, disciplines and origins — from Norwich to New York – and some of us are alumni of the AVÊÓƵ. We bring expertise that includes research, education, digital media, journalism, administration and communication.  
 
We’ve learnt so much already as we’ve collaboratively designed our values and defined how to achieve our goals. We’ve adopted an interdisciplinary and non-hierarchal approach to our work, so rather than working independently on different work strands, we’ve come together to identify our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks (and planned how to mitigate the latter); agreed our practices and processes; explored the project’s existing intellectual corpus; and planned the initial design of our core outputs – the first of these are our ‘living database-archive’ , a new digital publishing space, and our inaugural international event (watch this site for further announcement coming soon!). 

We’ve learnt that our home, the AVÊÓƵ, is a hotbed of innovation, and there is a wealth of expertise to hand, including the  Sussex Digital Humanities Lab – one of the University’s new Centres of Research Excellence within which our project is situated. 

We’ve tapped into some brilliant knowledge sharing. In June, we attended the inaugural conference of another Centre of Excellence: Sussex AI and a lecture held by the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab: Feminism confronts AI by Professor Judy Wajcman, from the The Alan Turing Institute. Some of our research team deepened their connection with wider humanities research at away days held by both the School’s Media, Arts and Humanities Research Institute and the Media, Cultural Studies and Journalism department.

Within Holocaust commemoration, the AVÊÓƵ has a trailblazing reputation. It was the first university in England to host a Holocaust Memorial Day event and continues to do so annually through the Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies, across which our Lab also sits and Victoria is now Deputy Director. 

We feel at home here. 

But what have we done towards our project goals so far?  

On our third day together, we held an event at the AVÊÓƵ called ‘Policy and funding sustainable interventions in digital Holocaust memory and education workshop’ with .  

The event was attended by , Lord Eric Pickles, Chair of the UK  (IHRA) Presidency 2024 and representatives from the United Nations, , , , The , , , and the Alfred Landecker Foundation. Some participants have told us that the workshop is already informing discussions about how they can better support digital Holocaust memory through rethinking funding models.

We’re currently working on a public report building on the event due to be published this autumn and we’re grateful to the  who hosted an opening talk and dinner as part of the programme.  

In July, we , Austin Xie, an undergraduate from the University of Chicago. He is with us for two months researching gaming and Holocaust education. Our first visiting faculty fellows join the team next academic year.  In the same month, we hosted a workshop at the international annual , this year held in Lima, Peru, forging new connections with Holocaust museum professionals in Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador. Thanks to the wonderful Malú Machuca Rose, we were able to host this as a bilingual event in English and Spanish.

Our research fellow Kate also ran a  with young people from across the UK aged 16-25 exploring social media and Holocaust education, which was hosted as part of the Holocaust Education Trust’s annual ambassadors conference (AmCon). 

Beyond these events, we , started planning our first major international event and new digital publishing space, and built momentum with designs for the prototype of our flagship ‘living database-archive’ of global digital Holocaust projects. This major resource will allow Holocaust memory professionals to learn from existing practice and connect with projects across the globe, and offer researchers easy access to digital Holocaust memory projects. We hope also that it will amplify peripheral stories of the Holocaust and how and where they might already be digitised and thus throw into sharp relief where digital Holocaust memory is most at risk. 

We’ll talk more about these activities in subsequent blogs in this series. Our small, new team has been busy. 

But the harder work is yet to come. 

The Landecker Digital Memory Lab launches this Autumn.  for more information. 

Would you like to be part of our team? We are currently recruiting for a research fellow in digital humanities,