Good Practice in Digital Commemoration of the Holocaust: An Analysis of COVID-Era Digital Programming at the Time of the 75th Anniversary of Liberation in Europe

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology, Memory, and Politics in the 2020s: Changes in Methods, Narratives, and Access", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II and the end of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma, 2020 was expected to be filled with Holocaust memorial ceremonies, cultural events, and educational programming. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic began in Europe, sites that had previously emphasized the value of on-site visits and programming suddenly found themselves unable to receive visitors. Digital remembrance techniques and programming suddenly became critically important to these sites’ missions to remember the victims of the Holocaust, provide a space for memorialization, and educate the public. We identified and analyzed changes in digital remembrance at 27 Holocaust sites in the first months of the pandemic; based on this data and existing literature about digital remembrance, dark heritage, and remembrance of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma, we outline a set of creative good practices for digital remembrance at these sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology, Memory, and Politics in the 2020s: Changes in Methods, Narratives, and Access   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow