Empowering people to explore the mediality of history and memory by means of digital technologies
Who we are
“Visual History of the Holocaust. Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age” is an innovation action funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme and carried out by an international consortium of 12 members with 3 associated partners. It started on January 1, 2019 and continues until March 31, 2023.
What we do
We aim at a re-evaluation of the visual history of the Holocaust, based on a comprehensive mapping, contextualization, and reframing of film documents recorded by Allied troops during and subsequent to the liberation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II.
We expand and contrast this corpus of images circulating in the West with little-known images from the East created by Allied Soviet cameramen from 1941 to 1945.
We are concerned with the advanced digitization and digital curation of these films, accompanying documents, and cultural heritage materials in general.
We link both well-known and unknown, edited and unedited examples of this so-called liberation footage to inform about how these images were produced, where they were shown, and how different audiences responded to them.
We trace these images through time and provide tools to explore how they have been used and reused in various contexts.
We develop new methods in digital curation by dynamically linking the filmic records with photographs, text documents, and oral histories in order to discover and unlock layers of context and meaning inaccessible through traditional linear narrative modes.
We follow an interdisciplinary approach drawing on the combined strength of experts from heritage institutions (archives, museums, and memorial sites), film scholars, historians and other researchers in the humanities, digital video experts and developers.
We apply sophisticated technologies such as automated analysis, time-based annotation as well as location-based services.
We create metadata solutions and vocabularies that may also be used in other fields of digital curation.
We combine state-of-the-art concepts and practices from information science, museum pedagogy and digital storytelling to design a new approach for the engagement with the Holocaust.
We innovate curatorial work with digitized film and media collections by developing new participatory forms of user interaction and enabling users’ engagement and co-creation.
We increase critical awareness for the use of imagery about mass murder by elaborating an ethics guideline about the digital curation of filmic records and contextual documents related to the Holocaust.
