Digital Memory. Towards a Research Repository on the Visual History of the Holocaust

“Visual History of the Holocaust. Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age” will develop models and applications to meet this challenge. It will explore the potentials as well as the limitations of digital technologies in an ongoing effort to preserve, analyze and communicate historical evidence of the Holocaust, especially audiovisual documents.
Over the course of the project, these historical films, which are currently dispersed in archives in the United States, Great Britain, Russia and other former Soviet republics, will be collected, digitized, analyzed and annotated. The resulting digital repository will allow researchers to dynamically link film images with photographs, textual documents and other evidence such as oral histories. This will allow us to create, for the first time, a complete “audiovisual iconography”, an “atlas” or annotated map of the historical visual representation of the Holocaust. We will see how certain iconographies have continued to be used, cited and transformed in other cinematic and media representations of the Holocaust.