NWO grant Yra van Dijk for international Holocaust research
Yra van Dijk obtained a NWO 'Internationalisation in the Humanities' grant. Together with Ernst van Alphen she will collaborate with 8 European and Israelian partners in researching 'Digital Memory of the Holocaust'.
The NWO funding means that they can organize 3 international seminars, write a handbook on Digital Memory Studies and set up a database.
Of course other scholars and PhD-students with a focus on Memory Studies are more than welcome to join this network, or the LUCAS Cultural Memory Reading Group.
Just contact Yra van Dijk.
New media & digital memory practices
In Poland, popular Facebook-pages have been opened in the name of Polish Holocaust-victims. In the Netherlands, a digital monument for the Jewish victims of WW II draws many online visitors. In Germany, a digital version of the Stolpersteine-project is being developed. And from all over the world people can visit the ‘virtual Schtetl’ developed in Warsaw. The location, the texture and the practices of memory are altering rapidly in the digital age.
New media are changing the ways in which individuals, communities and institutions produce memory. In this project, we will research the nature and function of digital memory practices- more specifically on digital memory of the Holocaust.
It is crucial that the affordances and limitations of digital memory are discussed and analyzed extensively on a transnational level in the years to come. New technology has an overpowering amount of agency, and can take memory culture in directions that were not foreseen or even desired. Still, rather than on anxiety about future dematerialization of memory culture, the focus will be on the possibilities of the formation of memory in the digital realm.
Joined European research
Nine European research groups will join forces in order to exchange and deepen our knowledge of digital memory practices. Collaborating with curators and digital artists, with historians, sociologists and cultural analysts, we will approach issues such as (1) interactivity and community (2) testimony, narrative and digital archives (3) performance, affect and presence. The meetings are not about answering these questions, but focus instead on the meta-question: which research activities are needed to answer them in the years to come?