Our understanding of history particularly draws on our shared visual cultural memory. Through their immersive potential, films and other moving images do have a particularly high impact on the formation and circulation of such visual cultural memory. To a certain degree, media images have come to augment and sometimes even replace personal experiences. Dealing with Europe’s darkest heritage, the “Visual History of the Holocaust (VHH)” Horizon 2020 Innovation Action fosters a media-literate interaction with history by means of digital tools. The project’s policy-relevant findings and policy recommendations, presented and discussed in a Policy Roundtable on “Visual History in the Digital Age” on June 15, 2021, and detailed in this paper, build on the project’s main research question:
How can digitization contribute to a better understanding of history (and to the lessons-learned for the future)?
Our recommendations touch on the fields of digital memory, digital infrastructure, and the digitization of the past in general. And they are informed by findings on advanced digitization and digital curation of difficult cultural heritage as well as technologically challenging media objects such as analog films.
