Article

Bridging cultural studies and learning science: An investigation of social media use for Holocaust memory and education in the digital age

January 2021
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 43(3):226-253

DOI:10.1080/10714413.2020.1862582

Authors:

Italian National Research Council

Along with advances in communication technology that are making new forms of historical memorialization and education available, social media are researched as valuable tools for supporting forms of digital memory and for engaging students and teachers about historical knowledge and moral education. This study aims to map the current state of Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education and to identify main topics of research in the two areas. It adopts a mixed-method approach that combines qualitative analysis with bibliometric approaches to review publications that use social media for digital memory and history education about the Holocaust. Results based on 28 publications reveal several research topics and that, despite some common theoretical references, the two subfields mostly rely on separate conceptual backgrounds. While Holocaust remembrance is a well-established research field, there are few studies and a lack of theoretical elaboration about social media use for teaching and learning about the Holocaust.

Understanding the Cultural Trauma behind Identity Creating a Third Space in the Middle of Polarity

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2024

To anticipate the eternal polarization in the 2024 election, this study uses a critical perspective to trace the upstream of the problem of identity politics in Indonesia. By using digital ethnography methods, this study explores various narratives of cultural trauma that often circulate in the midst of election momentum as the root of the problem of identity politics. In this study, the psycho-social paradigm is used to read various narratives in Twitter conversations as a response to cultural trauma against social bodies that resist. By using a conceptual framework related to the process of forming a third space through digital media, this study offers a form of cultural trauma coping in a divided society.

An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023

This study presents the construction and validation of a formal conceptual model, or domain ontology, useful for the formal representation and analysis of conversations on heritage, memory and identity (HMI) on social network sites (SNS), of interviews with participants in such conversations, and of scholarly works engaging with such phenomena. The ontology provides for the first time a conceptual framework for HM interactions on SNS addressing the semiotic and discursive nature of such interactions in the context of cultural-historical activity theory and semiosphere theory. Part of the Connective Digital Memory in the Borderlands research project, it is developed using an evidence-based knowledge elicitation and domain modeling approach. The study presents the three components of the ontology: an event-centric core conceptual model, an inductively derived concept taxonomy, and a meta-theoretical conceptual scheme, based on a combination of conceptual analysis and lexical analysis of relevant scholarly literature. To validate the ontology, it then provides an example of how it can be used to represent an actual HMI-related SNS conversation and scholarly intervention using knowledge graphs, a quantitative analysis of the occurrence of taxonomy terms in different subfields of HMI on SNS studies, a qualitative analysis of concepts used in studies on non-professional, archeological, and institutional heritage communication on SNS, and a meta-theoretical account of studies of HMI on SNS. The ontology can be used as a framework for theorization and for the development of data models, questionnaire protocols, thematic analysis vocabularies, and analysis queries relevant to HMI on SNS research.

A learning ecology-based approach for enhancing Digital Holocaust Memory in European cultural heritage education

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2023

This study adopts a conceptual research approach to examine recent developments in Digital Holocaust Memory regarding the use of digital technology for teaching and learning about the Holocaust. In order to promote heritage education, this paper proposes a conceptual framework that links the field of Digital Holocaust Memory with the approach of learning ecologies. A key element of this framework is the idea that technological advances can enhance learning by fostering participatory cultures and empowering users. The aim of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of how digital technology can be used to create meaningful learning experiences about the Holocaust, and to propose a theoretical lens based on an ecological approach to learning. In addition, the study aims to present a framework that can assist students in developing their own Holocaust-related learning experiences. The focus is on understanding Holocaust remembrance and learning as complex, multidirectional and multi-layered phenomena, influenced by the specific learning environment, the use of digital technology, and historical, political and cultural contexts. By taking into account the specific cultural, social and economic characteristics of the learning environment, this framework provides a comprehensive approach to designing educational interventions that meet the needs of learners, teachers and stakeholders.

Simalakama Sagu Dalam Rundung Ketahanan Pangan Bagi Orang Siberut Kepulauan Mentawai

Conference Paper

Dec 2022

Ade Irwandi

Pada tahun 1980-an pemerintahan Orde Baru gencar melakukan berbagai upaya untuk ‘memodernkan’ orang Mentawai karena dianggap kurang maju dan terasing. Pemajuan ini dapat dilihat dalam upaya pemerintah mem-beras-kan orang Mentawai dari ‘sagu’ sebagai pangan lokal. Proses peralihan ini juga dipicu melalui program memukimkan kembali (PKMT/Resettlement) dan membuat perkampungan (barasi) serta memaksa mengganti agama leluhur (arat sabulungan) mereka dengan agama Samawi (Islam, Protestan dan Katolik). Hal ini seolah-olah bukan masalah besar bagi penguasa. Masalah pangan memang menjadi hal yang sangat krusial di Siberut. Pergelutan antara sagu ke beras sebagai akar abstraksi keadaan pangan orang Siberut. Bukan masalah keterbatasan, namun beranjak dari pangan lokal utama menjadi makanan alternatif. Sagu, seperti memakan buah simalakama dalam rundungan wacana ketahanan pangan. Desakan program pembangunan yang belum menyusuri lorong-lorong lumbung perut orang Siberut di Mentawai. Sehingga muncul polemik pada diri orang Siberut, “memakan” atau “tidak memakan” buah simalakama itu. Tetapi ada ketakutan yang mungkin nyata bahwa pangan lokal sagu menjadi “kegelisahan” tidak mencukupinya pangan orang Siberut dalam bertahan hidup. Masa transisi yang telah berlangsung 4 dekade telah menyebabkan orang Siberut kehilangan jati diri sebagai orang Mentawai. Sagu bukan perkara makanan, tetapi masalah ruang hidup (ekologis), kepercayaan dan kebudayaan orang di Siberut. Perlu disadari bahwa, sagu berkenaan dengan the way of life orang Siberut yang beraraskan pada nilai-nilai luhur yang melibatkan relasi hubungan antara sesama manusia, dengan lingkungan alam serta hubungan sakral (sabulungan) melalui upacara adat (punen). Penekanannya dalam penelitian ini mengacu pada dialog antara kutub yang berbeda yaitu sagu sebagai sistem kebudayaan yang mungkin dientaskan oleh intervensi pembangunan, beras dan kebijakan yang menghegemoni orang Siberut terkait ketahanan pangan nasional. Hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa orang Siberut memiliki pangan lokal non beras yang bukan hanya dapat memenuhi kebutuhan pangan, namun juga berkaitan dengan kepercayaan, kelestarian ekologis dan berlangsung ajegnya life cycle’s (upacara adat). Namun bentuk hegemoni pemerintah melalui memukimkan orang Siberut (PKMT/Barasi/Rumah Sosial/Resettlement), memberikan bantuan beras (Ranstra/Raskin) dan menanam padi (600 ha cetak sawah) serta memaksa memilih agama Samawi. Hal ini memunculkan polemik yang menggelisahkan antara tetap memakan sagu atau beralih memakan beras. Simalakama inilah yang sedang berlangsung dalam kehidupan orang Siberut.

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023
NEW MEDIA SOC

Social network sites (SNS) have recently become an active ground for interactions on contested and dissonant heritage, on the heritage of excluded and subaltern groups, and on the heritage of collective traumatic past events. Situated at the intersection between heritage studies, memory studies, Holocaust studies, social media studies and digital heritage studies, a growing body of scholarly literature has been emerging in the past 10 years, addressing online communication practices on SNS. This study, an integrative review of a comprehensive corpus of 80 scholarly works about difficult heritage on SNS, identifies the profile of authors contributing to this emerging area of research, the increasing frequency of publication after 2017, the prevalence of qualitative research methods, the global geographic dispersion of heritage addressed, and the emergence of common themes and concepts derived mostly from the authors ‘home’ fields of memory studies, heritage studies and (digital) media studies.

Adapting History Education for the 21st Century: Integrating Technology and Critical Thinking Skills

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2023

Bih Ni Lee

Background: In the 21st century, the field of education is undergoing significant transformations due to advancements in technology and the growing emphasis on critical thinking skills. Adapting history education to meet the needs of this digital era requires integrating technology into instructional practices while fostering critical thinking abilities.This approach allows students to engage with primary sources, explore diverse perspectives, and develop the analytical skills necessary for understanding and interpreting complex historical events. Contribution: The integration of technology and critical thinking skills in history education contributes to a more dynamic and engaging learning experience for students in the 21st century. It empowers students to access primary sources, analyze multiple perspectives, and develop the essential skills needed for critical analysis and interpretation of historical events. Method: The synthesis method is a comprehensive approach to analyzing and integrating research findings on adapting history education for the 21st century through the integration of technology and critical thinking skills. By systematically reviewing and synthesizing relevant studies, it allows for the identification of common themes, trends, and gaps in the literature, providing a cohesive and nuanced understanding of the topic and informing best practices for educators in this field.. Results: The results of integrating technology and critical thinking skills in history education show improved student engagement, motivation, and understanding of historical concepts. Students also develop enhanced critical thinking abilities, such as analyzing evidence, evaluating sources, and constructing well-reasoned arguments, which prepare them for active participation in the complexities of the 21st century

Participating in professional development programmes or learning in the wild? Understanding the learning ecologies of Holocaust educators

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023
BRIT EDUC RES J

Holocaust education, which refers to the teaching and learning of the Holocaust—the systematic genocide of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II—is an essential component of history and social studies education in many countries. Its primary aim is to raise awareness of the Holocaust, promote understanding of its historical significance and develop critical thinking and empathy in students. However, despite the increasing specialisation and institutionalisation of Holocaust education, there is still a lack of understanding of how Holocaust educators acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to teach the subject effectively. This study aims to explore the learning ecologies of a group of Italian Holocaust educators, focusing on their motivations for initial and lifelong learning and their learning practices. Ten in‐depth interviews were conducted with teachers from different subject areas. The results showed that participants were driven by either personal or curricular motivations and interests and used a range of learning approaches for both initial and lifelong learning. Although few participants considered digital technologies and social media as a learning environment, they were found to be useful resources. The study concludes with practical implications for further research.

Shall androids dream of genocides? How generative AI can change the future of memorialization of mass atrocities

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023

The memorialization of mass atrocities such as war crimes and genocides facilitates the remembrance of past suffering, honors those who resisted the perpetrators, and helps prevent the distortion of historical facts. Digital technologies have transformed memorialization practices by enabling less top-down and more creative approaches to remember mass atrocities. At the same time, they may also facilitate the spread of denialism and distortion, attempt to justify past crimes and attack the dignity of victims. The emergence of generative forms of artificial intelligence (AI), which produce textual and visual content, has the potential to revolutionize the field of memorialization even further. AI can identify patterns in training data to create new narratives for representing and interpreting mass atrocities—and do so in a fraction of the time it takes for humans. The use of generative AI in this context raises numerous questions: For example, can the paucity of training data on mass atrocities distort how AI interprets some atrocity-related inquiries? How important is the ability to differentiate between human- and AI-made content concerning mass atrocities? Can AI-made content be used to promote false information concerning atrocities? This article addresses these and other questions by examining the opportunities and risks associated with using generative AIs for memorializing mass atrocities. It also discusses recommendations for AIs integration in memorialization practices to steer the use of these technologies toward a more ethical and sustainable direction.

An examination of learning ecologies associated with the Holocaust: The role of social media

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023
J COMPUT ASSIST LEAR

Background Holocaust memory and learning processes have become increasingly mediatised as a result of rapid technological advances. There is, however, little information available regarding how people learn about this topic informally through social media. Objectives This paper explores how adult learners develop their learning ecologies by using social media to learn about the Holocaust informally. Methods The study uses a learning ecology perspective to analyse the interests, expectations and learning process of a group of adult learners (N = 276). An online survey tool was developed to collect information on the interests, expectations, and benefits of learning about Holocaust‐related topics among online users of four Italian Holocaust museums' social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube). Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to summarise the characteristics of the sample and to answer the research questions. Results and Conclusions The results show that most of the respondents are mostly women, with an average age of 50 and a higher level of education. In terms of interest and expectations, they are particularly interested in issues related to the intertwining of transnational and national memory. They also express a sense of civic responsibility with regard to the legacy of the Holocaust. Finally, components of the learning process show proactive behaviour and a preference for individual learning, while interaction with peers is considered less important. Takeaways There is an urgent need to understand how learners' preferences influence the development of learning ecologies and the types of content they are most likely to be exposed to as a result. It is also important for social media content providers to understand that learners are looking for quality resources and trustworthy content to further their education.

Shall androids dream of genocides? How generative AI can change the future of memorialization of mass atrocities

Preprint

Full-text available

May 2023

The memorialization of mass atrocities such as war crimes and genocides facilitates the remembrance of past suffering, honors those who resisted the perpetrators, and helps prevent the distortion of historical facts. Digital technologies have transformed memorialization practices by enabling less top-down and more creative approaches to remember mass atrocities. At the same time, they may also facilitate the spread of denialism and distortion, attempt to justify past crimes and attack the dignity of victims. The emergence of generative forms of artificial intelligence (AI), which produce textual and visual content, has the potential to revolutionize the field of memorialization even further. AI can identify patterns in training data to create new narratives for representing and interpreting mass atrocities - and do so in a fraction of the time it takes for humans. The use of generative AI in this context raises numerous questions: For example, can the paucity of training data on mass atrocities distort how AI interprets some atrocity-related inquiries? How important is the ability to differentiate between human- and AI-made content concerning mass atrocities? Can AI-made content be used to promote false information concerning atrocities? This article addresses these and other questions by examining the opportunities and risks associated with using generative AIs for memorializing mass atrocities. It also discusses recommendations for AIs integration in memorialization practices to steer the use of these technologies toward a more ethical and sustainable direction.

Why is didactic transposition in disaster education needed by prospective elementary school teachers?

Article

Apr 2023

Disaster risk reduction is a significant focus on sustainable development. One way to reduce disaster risk is through disaster education. Through disaster education, disaster knowledge and disaster mitigation knowledge will be obtained. This research is a preliminary study of didactic transposition in disaster education. The method used in this study is the SLR approach and bibliometric analysis. The research findings indicate four forms of connectedness, classified based on the main keyword, disaster knowledge. The four linkages are described as (a) co-occurrence network analysis; (b) word cloud analysis; (c) word tree maps analysis; and (d) network visualization analysis. Subsequently, the findings of the four connectedness are grouped into four clusters. The first cluster is disaster risk reduction, the second cluster is knowledge, the third cluster is disaster mitigation, and the fourth cluster is disaster knowledge. The four connectedness and four clusters will be used as recommendations for future research on the design and development of didactic transpositions in disaster education for prospective elementary school teachers.

Gedenkstättenpädagogik und Soziale Medien. Eine qualitative Studie über die Verhandlung von Sozialen Medien und Bildungsarbeit durch Mitarbeitende in KZ-Gedenkstätten

Thesis

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Rebecca Starke

Zusammenfassung Im Zuge der Digitalisierung sind deutschsprachige KZ-Gedenkstätten zunehmend in den Sozialen Medien präsent. Vor dem Hintergrund des historisch-politischen Bildungsauftrages von KZ-Gedenkstätten ist es von Interesse zu klären, wie die Präsenz in den Sozialen Medien für diesen genutzt wird oder werden kann. Hierbei fokussiert die vorliegende Arbeit auf die Perspektive der Mitarbeitenden aus KZ-Gedenkstätten. Das Ziel der Forschungsarbeit liegt demzufolge in der Beantwortung der Frage, wie Mitarbeitende aus KZ-Gedenkstätten die Präsenz ihrer Einrichtung in den Sozialen Medien in Bezug auf Bildungsarbeit verhandeln. Um die Forschungsfrage zu beantworten, wurden teilstandardisierte Leitfadeninterviews mit Mitarbeitenden aus deutschsprachigen KZ-Gedenkstätten geführt. Die Interviews wurden mithilfe einer Kombination der konstruktivistischen Grounded-Theory und der dokumentarischen Methode ausgewertet. Aus dem daraus entstandenen Theoriemodell wird ersichtlich, dass die Zuordnung der Sozialen Medien zur Bildungsarbeit zentral von den vorhandenen Ressourcen und der Verhandlung der Potenziale und Grenzen, die für die Nutzung gesehen werden, abhängt. Die diversen Standpunkte der Befragten, ob und wie die Sozialen Medien für Bildungsarbeit genutzt werden, zeigen, dass sich das Themenfeld des Einsatzes der Sozialen Medien in Bezug zur digitalen Bildungsarbeit in KZ-Gedenkstätten aktuell noch aktiv in einem Verhandlungsprozess befindet. Die vorliegende Studie ist sowohl als reflexiver Einblick des Status Quo für Akteur*innen in der Praxis von Interesse als auch für den weiteren erziehungswissenschaftlichen Diskurs bezüglich der Möglichkeiten von digitaler Bildungsarbeit in den Sozialen Medien. Schlüsselwörter: Gedenkstättenpädagogik; Soziale Medien; digitale Bildungsarbeit; historisch-politische Bildung; KZ-Gedenkstätten; Digitalisierung; Grounded-Theory-Methodologie; Dokumentarische Methode

Virtual reality as a spatial prompt in geography learning and teaching

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2022

We examine the claim that virtual reality (VR) holds significant potential for pedagogical applications in geography. We do so with reference to results from a two-year research-teaching project embedded in a postgraduate course on “Heritage and Its Management.” We reflect on the implementation of a VR field trip to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum enabled by the high-immersive Inside Auschwitz guided documentary, drawing on surveys and interviews held with students after their participation in the field trip. We found that VR technology may work as a (dis)inhibitor and provided users with a sense of social and temporal freedom to explore sites but in combination with a new set of spatial and perceptual constraints. The VR field trip generated curiosity about the “details” of the site, but we argue that learning with and through VR technology only became possible via active bodily adaptations and renewed understandings of bodily capacities and their inequalities. We conclude that VR works most effectively if conceived not as a journey into a self-contained virtual realm but instead as a spatial prompt designed to provoke new questions for students already on the path to developing geographical understandings and imaginations related to specific sites.

Exploring tensions in Holocaust museums’ modes of commemoration and interaction on social media

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022
Tech Soc

Digital technologies and social media platforms have been used in museum communication for over a decade now, and Holocaust museums have increasingly adopted them in their modes of commemoration and provision of educational content. Nevertheless, very limited research has been conducted into the potential of social media as new memory ecologies. In this exploratory study, we conceive social media platforms as socio-technical-ecological systems whereby users develop and engage with memory practices of the Holocaust. We adopt a networked socio-ecological approach to analyse how a sample of Holocaust museums (N = 69) develop practices of digital Holocaust memory in social media. The institutions are analysed in terms of “size” (small, medium, or large), how they differ in their attitudes towards these practices, and to what extent they circulate Holocaust memory on social media. The study adopts multiple quantitative approaches and combines the results of a survey with a set of social media metrics analysing how museums engage on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube in terms of generated content, interactivity, popularity, and type of content. Results show that museums have an overall positive attitude towards social media although some concerns were expressed, mostly by smaller institutions; they tend to use mostly Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and to share educational content and information about the museum's activities. However, despite a tendency to aggregate a large number of fans and followers, especially in the case of larger institutions, interaction with users remains limited. Prospects for more interactive participation and its implications are also discussed.

Use of Social Media by Holocaust Museums and Memorials

Technical Report

Full-text available

Jul 2021

In this report, we present the findings of a survey which was aimed at investigating if and how a large sample of Holocaust museums and memorials use Social Media (SM) in their communication channels. The findings reported in this study reflect the responses of 69 Holocaust museums and memorials from across the world. The most representative countries are Germany (36.2%), the United States of America (13.0%), Italy (10.1%), Austria (5.8%) and Poland (5.8%). The institutions vary widely in age, ranging from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Památník Terezín, established in 1947, to the most recent KL Plaszow Museum and Memorial in Krakow, opened in 2021. In terms of type, they are mostly Memorial Sites (54%), Holocaust Museums (38%) and Former Concentration Camps (41%), but War and Military and Virtual museums are also included in the sample. Almost all the institutions have a website (99%) and 61 out of 69 (88%) reported using SM as a communication channel. Key Findings • Attitudes towards social media are globally positive, with 96% of respondents that consider SM beneficial for the museum/memorial and an important means for outreach (91%). While respondents consider SM a worthwhile investment (83%), they also expressed a need for dedicated resources to be set aside for SM (72%), with 54% reporting that SM require more resources than the museum can currently afford. • 59% of the institutions using SM have been doing so for over three years. • The Museums/memorials that use SM tend to concentrate on a few platforms. Facebook is the most frequently used (87% use it daily or weekly), followed by Instagram (62%, daily and weekly use) and Twitter (45%, daily and weekly use). • 48% of the institutions have an internal SM manager, while only 10% use an external SM Manager. In 31% of cases, the Director is in charge of social media profiles. Persons in charge of SM profiles have specific expertise in SM management or marketing only in 38% of cases. . • In terms of SM content, the institutions tend to publish mainly educational material (80%), to use SM for sharing information about activities and initiatives (74%) and to organise educational events (70%) often or very often. • 90% of the respondents reported that their institution follows the SM profile of other museums/memorials and 67% declared that they draw inspiration from those profiles. • Only 30% reported the intention to change their SM policies and strategies, mostly to diversify content according to the nature of the different platforms, to develop specific content for SM, to increase the number of platforms used, and to improve strategies and interaction with followers/fans. • As for changes induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, 89% reported pandemic-induced changes in various activities. Most institutions have increased the number of online events (79%), the frequency of posting (75%), and the variety of contents (74%). Other activities such as fundraising campaigns (80%) and contests/competitions (79%) have remained constant, while training on SM marketing has only increased in 25% of cases.

Three Institutions, three Platforms, One Goal: Social Media for Holocaust Remembrance

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Jun 2021

The use of digital technologies and social media has become an increasingly significant means for engagement in many fields, and that of cultural heritage is no exception. Specifically, Holocaust museums have long been committed to providing historical and educational content to their audiences, and to this end digital communication channels and social media in particular figure among the means employed. Despite this, relatively few research studies have investigated the potential of Holocaust museums' use of social media as new memory ecologies. This preliminary study investigates how three prominent Holocaust museums (Yad Vashem in Israel, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland) use Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to enhance knowledge and understanding of historical and remembrance events among the general public. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analysed the museums’ social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to investigate the topics and phrases that appear most often in the posted contents. Through latent semantic analyses, we determined the words most frequently used by the three museums themselves and within the three social media channels. Additionally, we employed topic modelling to determine underlying themes. This approach allowed us to identify possible similarities and differences between the museums’ communication output and their social media channels. Moreover, to illustrate these potential similarities and differences, we also conducted 2-Mode network analyses. Our results show that the museums’ use of each social media channel exhibits different types of topical foci. For example, Twitter posts specifically include terminology on the Auschwitz camp, Facebook communication is more centred on the “exhibition” and the “Nazi” regime, while on Instagram the combination of “holocaust” and “photo” can often be found. Furthermore, similarities were also found, namely that the topic of “Auschwitz” is omnipresent and that all museums appear to focus on the 1941–1945 timeframe. The study has implications for the kind of historical knowledge and contemporary information that Holocaust museums and memorials contribute to disseminating on their social media profiles.

COVID-19 as a Trigger for Sustainable Tourism and Eco-Influencers on Twitter

Preprint

Full-text available

Jan 2021

The social confinement resulting from the COVID-19 crisis temporarily reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Although experts consider that the decrease in pollution rates was not drastic, some surveys detect a growth in social concern about the climate. In this environment, institutions, city councils and companies have promoted sustainable tourism as a necessary option, even before world society regains freedom of movement. This work analyzes and geolocates the sustainable tourism and ecotourism proposals on Twitter, quantitatively and qualitatively, using the Twitonomy Premium tool, with data extracted at the end of December 2020. The results show an arduous activity in Ireland, Kenya, Sri Lanka, India, Croatia, Spain, Finland, France, Mexico and Pakistan, among others. The accounts that achieve the most impact and engagement are both from public institutions and influencers specialized in travel, writers and chefs, who act as eco-influencers. Ecotourism is promoted as the necessary option for the conservation of cities and landscapes, which will be visited by tourists supposedly more aware after the virus.

Digital Memory in the Post-Witness Era: How Holocaust Museums Use Social Media as New Memory Ecologies

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021

Stefania Manca

With the passing of the last testimonies, Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education progressively rely on digital technologies to engage people in immersive, simulative, and even counterfactual memories of the Holocaust. This preliminary study investigates how three prominent Holocaust museums use social media to enhance the general public’s knowledge and understanding of historical and remembrance events. A mixed-method approach based on a combination of social media analytics and latent semantic analysis was used to investigate the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube profiles of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum. This social media analysis adopted a combination of metrics and was focused on how these social media profiles engage the public at both the page-content and relational levels, while their communication strategies were analysed in terms of generated content, interactivity, and popularity. Latent semantic analysis was used to analyse the most frequently used hashtags and words to investigate what topics and phrases appear most often in the content posted by the three museums. Overall, the results show that the three organisations are more active on Twitter than on Facebook and Instagram, with the Auschwitz–Birkenau Museum and Memorial occupying a prominent position in Twitter discourse while Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had stronger presences on YouTube. Although the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibits some interactivity with its Facebook fan community, there is a general tendency to use social media as a one-way broadcast mode of communication. Finally, the analysis of terms and hashtags revealed the centrality of “Auschwitz” as a broad topic of Holocaust discourse, overshadowing other topics, especially those related to recent events.

A Social media archive for digital memory research

Chapter

Jan 2024

Given recent global crises, the imperative to preserve and analyze online content has never been more vital to enhancing our comprehension of contemporary changes. This book, the outcome of the 5th international RESAW conference that convened experts from fifty disciplines across seventeen countries in Marseille in June 2023, tackles the multifaceted challenges of web archiving. It underscores the dual roles of web archiving, as cultural heritage and as essential source material for researchers delving into contemporary events and the evolution of digital culture. Through twenty chapters, it explores the development of web archiving and examines how technical, cultural, geopolitical, societal, and environmental shifts impact its conception, study, and dissemination.

Remembrance practices in the 21st century: Collective and individual memory on social media – the case of @eva.stories

Article

Aug 2023
NARRAT INQ

Individuals and groups construct identity through storytelling. Sometimes individuals use these to remember past events and group narratives to foster a sense of belonging. The individual and group interact and build relationships through shared memory. The present paper examines the mediatic representations of individual perceptions of the Holocaust in @ eva.stories that evoke, revive, and revitalize Holocaust collective memory. Based on Multimodal Discourse Analysis, we analyzed and organized the findings according to the following communication categories: content, mode, and medium. Using Instagram to enliven Eva’s storytelling creates a unique duality between the audience and the implicit story content‎. Consequently, multimodal storytelling via Instagram bridges the historical past to the present generation. We conclude that the collective memory’s retelling and preservation constantly change due to cultural and political contexts. Consequently, as today’s online environments are a crucial sphere of discourse, online spaces play a role in creating, maintaining, and spreading collective memories.

Transnational Holocaust Memory, Digital Culture and the End of Reception Studies

Chapter

Full-text available

Aug 2017

Wulf Kansteiner

Witnessing Eva Stories: Media witnessing and self-inscription in social media memory

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022
NEW MEDIA SOC

This study examines the relations between memory, social media experience, and testimony in the Eva Stories Instagram project. By conducting a combined visual and multimodal analysis of the stories, as well as a close analysis of the relations between social media experience and testimony, we claim that Eva Stories establishes a new responsive space for remembering the Holocaust. This space enables users to inscribe themselves into mediated Holocaust memory and to become media witnesses through the co-creation of socially mediated experiences. The self-inscription of the user is made possible by three interrelated modes of media witnessing, which continuously evoke user engagement. These new modes, we argue, indicate a new kind of agency in relation to media witnessing: the ability to testify on one’s own present social media engagement with mediated memory, and become a witness to it.

Holocaust Education in the Primary School: some reflections on an emergent debate

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2003

Geoffrey Short

Recent years have witnessed the beginnings of a debate over whether the Holocaust should be taught in primary schools. In this article the claims advanced in favour of the proposal are shown to be plausible but lacking in empirical support, while the counter-claims are considered either peripheral, contentious or contrary to established research. It is argued that some key omissions in the debate, such as the way primary school pupils conceptualise Jewish culture and identity, significantly strengthen the case against introducing young children to the Holocaust.

Systematic Reviews in Educational Research - Methodology, Perspectives and Application

Book

Full-text available

Nov 2019

In this open access edited volume, international researchers of the field describe and discuss the systematic review method in its application to research in education. Alongside fundamental methodical considerations, reflections and practice examples are included and provide an introduction and overview on systematic reviews in education research. Contents • Reflections on the Methodological Approach of Systematic Reviews • Ethical Considerations of Conducting Systematic Reviews in Educational Research • Teaching Systematic Review • Conceptualizations and Measures of Student Engagement • The Role of Social Goals in Academic Success Target Groups Researchers, instructors, and students in the field of education and related disciplines The Editors Prof. Dr. Olaf Zawacki-Richter, Professor of Educational Technology, Center for Open Education Research (COER), Faculty of Education and Social Science, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. Prof. Dr. Michael Kerres, Professor of Educational Science | Learning Technology & Innovations, Learning Lab, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany. Dr. Svenja Bedenlier, Research Associate, Center for Open Education Research (COER), Faculty of Education and Social Science, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. Melissa Bond, Research Associate, Center for Open Education Research (COER), Faculty of Education and Social Science, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. Katja Buntins, Research Associate, Learning Lab, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany.

What is ‘virtual Holocaust memory’?

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2019

Victoria Grace Walden

As more Holocaust memorial and educational organizations engage with digital technologies, the notion of virtual Holocaust memory has come to the fore. However, while this term is generally used simply to describe digital projects, this paper seeks to re-evaluate the specificity of virtuality and its relationship to memory through the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson in order to consider how both digital and non-digital memory projects related to the Holocaust might be described as drawing attention to the virtuality of memory because they bring us into critical interstitial spaces between multiple layers of pasts and present in embodied ways that encourage us to consciously recognize the movements towards temporal planes which characterize memory. After reviewing the philosophies of Deleuze and Bergson in light of collaborative Holocaust memory, this article considers a range of digital and physical memorials to assess where we might find examples of virtual Holocaust memory today. I propose that we should see the virtual as a methodology – a particular form of memory practice – rather than a medium.

Bibliometric Method for Mapping the State-of-the-Art and Identifying Research Gaps and Trends in Literature: An Essential Instrument to Support the Development of Scientific Projects

Chapter

Full-text available

Nov 2019

Bibliometric analysis is an indispensable statistic tool to map the state of the art in a given area of scientific knowledge and identify essential information for various purposes, such as prospecting research opportunities and substantiating scientific researches. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to present a method of biblio-metric analysis for mapping the state of the art and identifying gaps and trends of research. The method encompasses instruments to identify and analyze the scientific performance of articles, authors, institutions, countries, and journals based on the number of citations, to reveal the trends of the field studied through the analysis of keywords, and to identify and cluster scientific gaps from most recent publications. This method enables to expand in a scientific way the boundaries of science by investigating and identifying relevant and avant-garde research topics. It is an essential element that provides researchers means to identify and support paths towards the development of scientific projects.

Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries: Mapping Educational Science in the Discourse on Social Media

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2019
TEACH COLL REC

Social media has attracted considerable scholarly interest. Previous research has demonstrated the need for a more comprehensive overview of social media research across diverse disciplines. However, there is a lack of research that identifies the scope of social media integration across educational settings and how it relates to research in other academic disciplines. Harnessing the search terms of previous literature reviews, this study collected data on 80,267 articles from the Web of Science Core Collection database using search terms that were based on previous literature reviews. The data were analyzed using a combination of co-citation and bibliometric analyses via a mixed-methods approach. Our results show that there has been a constant increase in the number of publications concerned with social media, both as a transversal topic and within the educational sector. We are also able to show a range of topical domains in which the vast majority of research on social media is conducted. Our findings have practical implications for scholars and practitioners alike. Scholars can benefit from these types of analyses to identify authors and topic clusters that might otherwise have been unrecognized. Similarly, practitioners can benefit from this overview of the current “state-of-the-art” on social media.

Learning ecologies through a lens: Ontological, methodological and applicative issues. A systematic review of the literature

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2019
BRIT J EDUC TECHNOL

The concept of learning ecologies emerged in a context of educational change. While the “learning ecologies” construct has offered a broad semantic space for characterizing innovative ways of learning, it is also true that its potential to promote innovative educational interventions may have been hindered by this same broadness. Based on this assumption, in this paper the authors carried out a systematic review of the literature on learning ecologies with the aim of analysing: (1) the varying definitions given to the concept, including the ontological perspective underlying the phenomena studied; (2) the methodological approaches adopted in studying the phenomenon; and (3) the applications of the research on this topic. Throughout this analysis, the authors attempt to describe the criticalities of the existing research, as well as the potential areas of development that align well with the theoretical/ontological issues, methodological approaches and educational applications. The authors selected and analysed 85 articles, which they then classified in a set of 20 categories defined by them on a theoretical basis. Moreover, in order to triangulate the manual coding, a bibliometric map was created showing the co‐citation activity of the 85 papers. The emerging picture showed significant variability in the ontological definitions and methodological approaches. In spite of this richness, few educational applications currently exist, particularly with regard to technology‐enhanced learning developments. Most research is observational, devoted to describing hybrid (digital and on‐site) learning activities that bridge the gap between the school and social spaces. Furthermore, many of the studies relate to the field of secondary education, with fewer studies exploring adult learning and higher education. The studies dealing with professional development relate mostly to teachers’ continuing education. The authors conclude that the concept of learning ecologies could be used to address further experimental and design‐based research leading to research applications if there is proper alignment between the ontological, methodological and applicative dimensions. The main potential of this strategy lies in the possibility of supporting learners by raising their awareness of their own learning ecologies, thereby empowering them and encouraging them to engage in agentic practices. This empowerment could help maintain and build new and better learning opportunities, which every learning ecology can incorporate, amidst the chaotic abundance that characterizes the digital society.

Memory in the margins: The connecting and colliding of vernacular war memories

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2019

Stephanie de Smale

This article examines how war memory circulates, connects and collides on digital media platforms driven by digital publics that form around popular culture. Through a case study of vernacular memory discourses emerging around a game inspired by the Yugoslav war, the article investigates how the commenting practices of YouTube users provide insights into the feelings of belonging of conflict-affected subjects that go beyond ethnicity and exceed geographical boundaries. The comments of 331 videos were analysed, using an open source tool and sequential mixed-method content analysis. Media-based collectivities emerging on YouTube are influenced by the reactive and asynchronous dynamics of comments that stimulate the emergence of micro-narratives. Within this plurality of voices, connective moments focus on shared memories of trauma and displacement beyond ethnicity. However, clashing collective memories cause disputes that reify identification along ethnic lines. The article concludes that memory discourses emerging in the margins of YouTube represent the affective reactions of serendipitous encounters between users of audio-visual content.

Holocaust memorialisation and social media. Investigating how memorials of former concentration camps use Facebook and Twitter

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Jan 2019

Stefania Manca

In historical memory education, digital technologies are gaining momentum and becoming influential in enhancing the general public's knowledge and understanding of historical events such as genocides and war atrocities. Holocaust remembrance centres and Holocaust museums have had a solid presence on the Internet for considerable time now, curating websites, mailing lists and other digital services. Social media are increasingly proving to be extremely valuable tools for allowing museums to engage with their public and for managing relations with past and future visitors. Indeed, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Instagram profiles have become significant components of the communication portfolios of various Holocaust organisations. Twitter mostly helps the public to keep up with the latest information and developments of the organisations concerned, while the Facebook pages of Holocaust victims and individual memorials are mainly set up for historical memorialisation. Despite growing use of these channels, very little research has been conducted to investigate the communication strategy of Holocaust organizations in social media, and a comprehensive overview of Holocaust memorial site presence on social media is still lacking. This study provides a preliminary analysis of Facebook pages and Twitter profiles of 23 memorials of former concentration camp located across Europe. The overarching aim is to investigate how these memorial organisations engage the public through social media, both at content page level and at relational level. The communication strategies of Facebook pages and Twitter profiles were analysed in terms of generated content, interactivity and popularity. A quantitative analysis was conducted by manual search and inspection of pages and profiles, combined with the application of social media data analysis platforms like LikeAlyzer, Fanpage Karma and Twitonomy. Results show that the majority (N=17) of the memorial organizations have a Facebook page, while only about a third (N=9) are active on Twitter. Moreover, great variance among the various social media services was observed, with many showing limited activity or low engagement levels. Indications for future research and limitations of the study are also reported.

Limits of Universalization: The European Memory Sites of Genocide

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2018

Éva Kovács

The twentieth century became known as the era of genocides. However, historians do not yet agree on the use of the category of genocide for all mass killings in the twentieth century and still are debating their place in European civilization. My article focuses on the European lieux de mémoire of the genocides within the associative framework of the fundamental question about the material evidence of crime. This framework helps highlight the limits of universalization in European memory politics. In understanding them as a dynamically developing social phenomenon, this article analyses it in two dimensions: the emergence of the memory of the Holocaust as an archetype of genocide, and the crimes of Communism as a rival memory framework in Eastern Europe. In closing, I will return to the incessant search for the material evidence of genocide. This article challenges the general concept of the European lieux de mémoire of the genocide from this point of view as well.

Nurturing the pain: audiovisual tributes to the Holocaust on YouTube

Article

Full-text available

May 2018

Mykola Makhortykh

This article examines how digital technology interacts with Holocaust remembrance in post-socialist countries. Using the Lviv pogrom of 1941 as a case study, it explores how Russophone and Ukrainophone web users engage with audiovisual tributes to this event on YouTube. The article scrutinizes user engagement with Holocaust memory on two levels: the level of representation (how the pogrom is represented on YouTube) and the level of interaction (how users interact with tributes to the pogrom). The article suggest that digital media can democratize existing memory practices, but it does not necessarily lead to more pluralist views on the past.

War Memories and Online Encyclopedias: Framing 30 June 1941 in Wikipedia

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2017

Mykola Makhortykh

This article examines how digital media interact with collective memories and teaching practices by exploring a selection of Wikipedia articles that describe the capture of Lviv by the Germans on 30 June 1941. This event constitutes an important episode in the history of Ukraine and a complex case of violence that produced several controversies concerning the national historiographies of the Second World War in the post-Soviet region. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics, this article investigates how the event is represented in different language versions of Wikipedia and assesses what kind of memory is produced by each of them.

Framing the Holocaust in popular knowledge: 3 articles about the Holocaust in English, Hebrew and Polish Wikipedia

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2016

Daniel Wolniewicz-Slomka

Framing the Holocaust in popular knowledge: 3 articles about the Holocaust in English, Hebrew and Polish Wikipedia The goal of this article is to examine how different events and phenomena related to the Second World War and the Holocaust are framed via Wikipedia articles written in Polish, Hebrew and English. Departing from the pillars of the theory of framing in mass media, the article conducts a content analysis of three articles, in three different languages. The articles under analysis are the following: “Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp”, “The Pogrom in Jedwabne”, and “Righteous Among the Nations”. The analysis will use the four roles of frames as categories, determined by Entman: definition of the problem/phenomenon, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and treatment recommendation. Analyzing how the articles fulfill each of the roles in the different languages, the research hypothesis is that the framing of the phenomena will differ between the versions, and each version will follow pillars of the collective memory of the Holocaust in its respective country. Findings, however, are not in complete compliance with this hypothesis. Kształtowanie popularnej wiedzy o Holocauście na przykładzie trzech artykułów z polskiej, hebrajskiej i angielskiej Wikipedii Celem artykułu jest zbadanie, jak przedstawiane są wybrane wydarzenia i zjawiska, związane z historią II wojny światowej oraz Holokaustem, w internetowej encyklopedii „Wikipedia” w różnych językach. Prezentowana analiza treści opiera się na teorii framingu w mass mediach i obejmuje trzy artykuły: „Auschwitz-Birkenau”, „Pogrom w Jedwabnem” oraz „Sprawiedliwy wśród Narodów Świata”, opublikowane w językach polskim, angielskim oraz hebrajskim. W analizie wykorzystano cztery role „ram” (frames), sformułowane przez Entmana: definicja problemu/zjawiska, interpretacja przyczyn, ewaluacja moralna oraz propozycja rozwiązań. Autor, badając to, jak poszczególne artykuły wypełniają każdą z tych ról, stawia hipotezę, zgodnie z którą teksty przedstawiają ten sam temat w różny sposób, w zależności od podstaw pamięci zbiorowej w danym kraju. Wyniki badań jednak nie zawsze są zgodne z tą hipotezą.

Geschichte im Social Web. Geschichtsnarrative und Erinnerungsdiskurse auf Facebook und Twitter mit dem kulturwissenschaftlichen Medienbegriff "Medium des kollektiven Gedächtnisses" analysieren

Chapter

Jan 2015

Hannes Burkhardt

Death camp heritage ‘from below’? Instagram and the (re)mediation of Holocaust heritage

Chapter

Jul 2018

Richard Carter-White

A Decade of Research on K–12 Teaching and Teacher Learning with Social Media: Insights on the State of the Field

Article

Jun 2020

Background and Context The increasingly widespread use of social media to expand one's social connections is a relatively new but important phenomenon that has implications for teaching, learning, and teachers’ professional knowledge and development in the 21st century. Educational research in this area is expanding, but further investigation is necessary to better determine how to best support teachers in their professional development, collaboration, and classroom teaching. Prior literature reviews have focused extensively on higher education settings or particular platforms or platform types (e.g., Facebook, microblogging). This article provides needed insights into K–12 settings and encompasses work from a variety of social media types. We describe a systematic review of more than a decade of educational research from various countries to present the state of the field in K–12 teachers’ use of social media for teaching and professional learning across various platforms. Research Questions To define social media's potentially beneficial roles in teaching and learning, we must first take an in-depth look at teachers’ current social media practices. Toward this end, we approached our review with the following research question: How are social media perceived and used by K–12 teachers for their teaching or professional learning, and with what impacts on teachers’ practices? Research Design Guided by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) established standards for rigor and quality in systematic literature reviews, this article reviews empirical research to examine how social media are perceived and used by K–12 teachers with what impacts on teachers’ practices. Findings We find that social media features offer several benefits for helping teachers fulfill their goals for classroom teaching, including enhancing student engagement, community connections, and teacher–student interactions, but these affordances come with challenges that must be navigated. The literature also suggests that social media features provide benefits for teachers’ professional learning within both formal professional development programs and informal learning networks. Conclusions Implications of this literature review for future research and the design of educational practices are discussed in the final section. Among our conclusions are calls for more data triangulation between teachers’ and students’ learning and experiences on social media, more attention to teachers’ observational behaviors on social media, and further exploration of how social media facilitates interplay between teachers’ formal and informal learning.

Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion

Article

May 2020

Yehuda Bauer

Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945

Book

Jan 2016

Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness

Book

Sep 2014

Arlene Stein

“Think globally, act locally”: A glocal approach to the development of social media literacy

Article

Jan 2021
COMPUT EDUC

Despite the documented number of studies that investigate social media in teaching and learning settings, the topic of social media literacy is still an under-researched area. This study adopts the theoretical lens of New Literacy studies to suggest a combined perspective for investigating social media literacies. This perspective considers both social media skills that are transversal across different social media (global skills), and those that pertain to a specific social media platform (local skills). It examines practices that are decontextualized (literacy as something to be acquired), and those that are situated and context-dependent (literacy through participation). To map current research on social media skills, a systematic literature review was conducted. Analysis of 54 publications was carried out following the UNESCO DLGF framework for digital literacy competencies, and also using a critical lens based on four metaphors whereby, for learning purposes, social media are seen as a tool, as a process, as collaboration, and as participation. The results show that most of the studies consider global social media skills, while only a few examine skills sets specific to a particular social media platform. In addition, most of the identified skills concern decontextualized practices, with very few studies emphasizing the importance of fostering situated social media practices. We conclude that there is a need for more expansive theoretical elaboration in the field, and provide a number of recommendations for investigating, understanding, and designing educational curricula and activities that support the development of social media literacy.

To what extent does the acquisition of historical knowledge really matter when studying the Holocaust?

Chapter

Jul 2020

Stuart Foster

Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Book

Jan 2009

Michael Rothberg

Visitor perceptions of European Holocaust Heritage: A social media analysis

Article

Dec 2020
TOURISM MANAGE

Alexander Craig Wight

This study presents a netnographic discourse analysis of social media content generated around three high profile European Holocaust heritage sites: Ann Frank's House in Amsterdam, The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany. It identifies four salient discourses under the headings of Holocaust heritage as social memory, reactions to Holocaust heritage, obligation and ritual, and transgressive visitor behaviour which frame the values, existential anxieties, emotions, priorities and expectations of visitors. The findings will be of interest to stakeholders involved in the planning and management of Holocaust heritage since they provide unique access to a synthesis of unmediated visitor feedback on European Holocaust heritage experiences.

The Relationship Between Highly Visual Social Media and Young People’s Mental Health: A Scoping Review

Article

May 2020
CHILD YOUTH SERV REV

Users of highly visual social media (HVSM), such as Snapchat and Instagram, share their messages through images, rather than relying on words. A significant proportion of people that use these platforms are adolescents. Previous research reveals mixed evidence regarding the impact of online social technologies on this age group’s mental wellbeing, but it is uncertain whether the psychological effects of visual content alone differ from text-driven social media. This scoping review maps existing literature that has published evidence about highly visual social media, specifically its psychological impact on young people. Nine electronic databases and grey literature from 2010 until March 2019 were reviewed for articles describing any aspect of visual social media, young people and their mental health. The screening process retrieved 239 articles. With the application of eligibility criteria, this figure was reduced to 25 articles for analysis. Results indicate a paucity of data that exclusively examines HVSM. The predominance of literature relies on quantitative methods to achieve its objectives. Many findings are inconsistent and lack the richness that qualitative data may provide to explore the reasons for theses mixed findings.

#Holocaust #Auschwitz: Performing Holocaust Memory on Social Media

Chapter

Apr 2020

Meghan Lundrigan

This chapter is an introduction to Holocaust memory and social media, and discusses the experience of the Holocaust memory and history through Instagram. It demonstrates the ways in which networked images taken by visitors and tourists at Auschwitz State Museum affect, shift, or confirm methods of both scholarly and popular engagement with Holocaust history and memory. The chapter builds on the discussions of the Holocaust and dark tourism, concerning the Holocaust in the digital age, engaging with public representations and the Holocaust vis‐a‐vis the Instagram hashtag. Using the hashtag as a pivot point, it discusses its importance in the context of contemporary photographs of Auschwitz, shared by English‐speaking tourists on Instagram. Attempts to communicate the experience of visiting Auschwitz rely on a sense of place‐making connected to an “imagined Auschwitz.”

The unanchored past: Three modes of collective memory

Article

Dec 2019

Paul O'Connor

All forms of collective memory embody attempts at meaning-making - efforts to integrate experience and provide a coherent foundation for individual and collective identities. However, different modes of collective memory have different meaning-making potentials. In this article, I will assess three modes of remembering, namely folk, commemorative and mediatised memory, from the perspective of how they generate integrative meaning. Each of these modes of remembrance will be examined through the prism of a case study examining the nature of the memories associated with a specific lieux de memoire. I will suggest that over time, memory becomes progressively ‘unanchored’ from localised contexts due to its increasing technological and institutional mediation and that this has important implications for the depth and kind of meaning it provides.

Image substitutes and visual fake history: historical images of atrocity of the Ukrainian famine 1932–1933 on social media

Article

Nov 2019

Ekatherina Zhukova

This article analyses how pre-internet historical images of atrocity are used on social media in the era of misinformation, disinformation and a rising radical right. Combining scholarship in cultural sociology, media studies and communication, and history, the article introduces two concepts: image substitute and visual fake history. Image substitute is an image of an historical event from a particular time or place, which is used to represent a tragedy from a different decade or geographical location. Visual fake history is a combination of truth, misinformation and disinformation about past events through reliance on historical images as image substitutes and accompanying narratives. These concepts are developed empirically on the basis of images representing the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, circulated on Instagram under #holodomor between 2012–2018. It is shown that the Ukrainian famine was visualized through images of Soviet and South Asian famines and the Holocaust, which were embedded in anti-communist and anti-Semitic narratives.

Snapping, pinning, liking or texting: Investigating social media in higher education beyond Facebook

Article

Jan 2020
Internet High Educ

Stefania Manca

Commercial social media are being increasingly adopted in formal learning settings even though they have not been conceived specifically for education. Whereas highly popular social services like Facebook and Twitter have been thoroughly investigated for their benefits for teaching and learning in higher education, other social media platforms which have been gaining considerable attention among youth have been largely overlooked in scholarly literature. The purpose of this study is to fill that vacuum by analyzing whether and how social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and WhatsApp have become an integral component of teaching and learning in higher education. A total of 46 studies are analyzed in terms of what pedagogical affordances of these four platforms they identify (e.g., mixing information and learning resources, hybridization of expertise, widening of the context of learning) and the benefits for learning that the authors go on to investigate. Results show that although the use of WhatsApp is well documented in a plethora of studies, there is a dearth of research about Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. While more than half of the studies are carried out in the Middle East and Asian areas and investigate mostly benefits for second and foreign language learning, the overall geographical distribution of studies examining learning via social media reflects the preferences expressed for these services on the part of the general population. Moreover, it is found that the pedagogical affordances of social media are still only being partially implemented and that diverse social media exploit affordances to different degrees.

Social Media und Holocaust Education. Chancen und Grenzen historisch-politischer Bildung

Chapter

Nov 2019

Hannes Burkhardt

Based on two current case studies, the article shows that social media offer short texts which can be read as a condensation of a considerable range of actors and their positions. Using social media allows teachers to integrate controversy at different places of historical-political education. Social media can illustrate controversies in the fields of history politics and memory culture. The two case studies are on the one hand on the controversies around awarding the music prize “Echo” to the Hip-Hop-musicians Kollegah and Farid Bang in April 2018 and on the other hand on the instrumentalization of the memory of the bombing of Dresden at the end of the Second World War in February 2018. Both topics/issues sparked controversies in social media with discursive references to the Holocaust. Since the 1970s the Beutelsbach consensus—as a minimum standard of civic education—offers guidelines for dealing with controversial topics—also beyond the Holocaust. The article deals with the question, to what extent also controversial right-wing populist and extremist positions—not only by means of social media—should be integrated into learning processes in order to illustrate didactic opportunities for Holocaust Education resulting from the two case studies.

Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma

Book

Jan 2000

Memory crisis: The Shoah within a collective European memory

Article

Aug 2019

Stefan Van der Poel

This paper analyses the memory crisis resulting from conflicting perceptions of the Shoah in Western and Central Europe. To clarify this memory crisis, crucial aspects of these divergent perceptions will be discussed. From the Western perspective, there is a strong tendency to underline the universal meaning and importance of the Shoah, and to institutionalize this in UN and EU resolutions and declarations. From an Eastern perspective, this process of globalizing Shoah discourse is often considered to be a Western preoccupation and as just another mechanism to promulgate further Western cultural domination. In Central Europe the supposed singularity of the Shoah is not only often doubted, but the focus is shifted far more on to processing communism and identity-based policies. To clarify and illustrate how the Shoah is reflected on in historical debates and the public domain, recent Polish and Hungarian monuments, museums, literature and films are discussed.

Codifying gradients of evil in select YouTube comment postings

Article

Jul 2019

Eric D. Miller

This investigation featured a content analysis of 2,269 publicly available YouTube comment postings in order to provide insight into how users evaluate and interpret videos containing explicit and graphic imagery with palpable relevance to themes of evil. Famed social psychologist Leonard Berkowitz (1999), suggested that evil should necessarily have differing gradients. Using this framework, select comments from four widely viewed and graphic videos from the following events were utilized as they were deemed to depict evil in the following descending order: The Holocaust, 9/11, the 2015 WDBJ shootings, and the 2014 Ray Rice assault. It was hypothesized and largely found that videos associated with greater evil showed a greater recognition from YouTube users as such as well as greater compassion toward the depicted victims. However, as expected, there were also tendencies for the Holocaust video to be particularly associated with select negative comments (e.g., racism or suggesting it was a fake event). This research furthers our understanding of how individuals make sense of traumatic events with varying degrees of evil in an online context.

‘The Holocaust is a place where … ’: the position of Auschwitz and the camp system in English secondary school students’ understandings of the Holocaust

Article

Jun 2019

This paper presents data drawn from a recent empirical study involving more than 8,000 English secondary school students (aged 11–18) who took part in either a survey or focus group interview. It critically examines the significance of Auschwitz and the wider camp system within young people’s knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust. The paper reflects upon the tension between, on the one hand, academic historians’ requirements of clarity, differentiation and the recognition of both complexity and nuance in making sense of this past, and, on the other, the imprecision, abstraction and/or confusion often associated with, and characteristic of, dominant, Auschwitz-centric narratives of the Holocaust. In doing so, it identifies a number of important yet ostensibly widely shared misinterpretations, mistakes and misconceptions reflected in English school students’ engagement with this history.

Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era

Book

Jan 2015

Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era shifts focus from discussions on the ethics and limits of representation to the relevance of imagination in Holocaust commemoration. It re-examines ethical, aesthetic and political dilemmas arising from the crucial transfer of memory from the realm of 'living memory' contained by the survivors and their families, to culturally and politically mediated memory practices realised by post-witness generations. Why are artistic imaginative representations of the Holocaust important now? Critical analyses of little discussed artworks, memorials, film, comics and literature point to a diversification of approaches and Holocaust re-presentations in Europe, showing that memory and imagination are increasingly and intimately intertwined. This volume's contributions make apparent the genuine struggle among those born after the Holocaust, whether Jewish, Polish, German, Austrian, or Swedish, to make the past relevant in the present, well-aware that one cannot fully own or comprehend it

Selfies from Auschwitz: Rethinking the relationship between spaces of memory and places of commemoration in the digital age

Article

Jan 2017

M. Zalewska

This paper seeks to map theoretical and practical preoccupations in the contemporary relationship between places of commemoration and more abstract spaces of Holocaust memory. While the range of this topic is broad, I narrow the scope by interrogating specific ways in which the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum engages with Holocaust-related visual content on Instagram. The direction in which the memory of the Holocaust is moving and the ubiquity of social media posts, forces institutions like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to valorise, react, and engage with new media content. Therefore, the case study of ‘selfies from Auschwitz’ resonates in productive ways with questions of individual and institutional socio-historical agency in curatorship of 21 st century Holocaust memory, as well as discussions on guardianship and claims to ownership of memory in the digital age. Contending that the Museum asserts itself as an increasingly visible actor in the transnational social media Holocaust discourse, I trace the history of the Museum’s social media presence and engagement. © 2017 School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds. All rights reserved.

Understanding and Teaching Holocaust Education

Book

Jan 2017

From “Double Genocide” to “the New Jews”: Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence in Post-Communist Memorial Museums

Article

Oct 2018

Ljiljana Radonić

Eastern European EU accession candidates have used memorial museums and installed new permanent exhibitions to communicate with “Europe” in view of the Holocaust's “univer salization” and “Europeanization.” One group demands that “Europe” acknowledge its suffering under Communism, while the other group tries to demonstrate its compatibility with Europe by invoking “Europe” in their exhibition texts and publications and referencing western Holocaust museums in their aesthetics. This article focuses on two countries from each group: Latvia and Lithuania, which highlight their victimhood under “double occupation,” on the one hand; and the current successor states of the “Slovak Republic” and the “Independent State of Croatia,” two Nazi satellite states, on the other. I begin by analysing how the terms “Holocaust,” “genocide,” and “mass violence” are used in the respective Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak and Croatian memorial museums. I argue that both groups share an awkwardness in dealing with the term “Holocaust,” and a tendency to present “our” victims with the help of individual stories and private photographs designed to evoke empathy, while presenting “their” victims – Jews and, even more so, Roma – with the help of often humiliating photos shot by the perpetrators. I then show that the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s – in contrast to the peaceful transitions in the other countries – had a distinctive effect on debates concerning the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence. Moving beyond the realm of museum analysis, I pinpoint the broader cultural phenomenon of Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks portraying themselves as “the new Jews,” before focusing specifically on the new permanent exhibition at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial, which I discuss as a best practice example for the universalization of the Holocaust.

Holocaust Tweets as an Act of Resistance

Article

Sep 2018

Lia Friesem

More than other collective memories, the Holocaust is the most vivid memory in today’s Israeli existence. As a result of comprehensive official and unofficial memory work that utilizes the Holocaust as a political and educational tool, on the one hand, and due to the advent of the new media, on the other, its grip on everyday Israeli reality is only growing stronger. As part of a broader research project focusing on resistive cultural activity on Israeli Twitter, this article makes visible the striking omnipresence of the Holocaust on this social network, while maintaining that many of the ‘Holocaust tweets’ constitute an act of resistance. That is, users are engaged in oppositional decoding in a battle against the hegemonic Holocaust discourse.

Learning in the wild: coding for learning and practice on Reddit

Article

Jul 2018

Learning on and through social media is becoming a cornerstone of lifelong learning, creating places not only for accessing information, but also for finding other self-motivated learners. Such is the case for Reddit, the online news sharing site that is also a forum for asking and answering questions. We studied learning practices found in ‘Ask’ subreddits AskScience, Ask_Politics, AskAcademia, and AskHistorians to develop a coding schema for informal learning. This paper describes the process of evaluating and defining a workable coding schema, one that started with attention to learning processes associated with discourse, exploratory talk, and conversational dialogue, and ended with including norms and practices on Reddit and the support of communities of inquiry. Our ‘learning in the wild’ coding schema contributes a content analysis schema for learning through social media, and an understanding of how knowledge, ideas, and resources are shared in open, online learning forums.

Hello from the other side: museum educators’ perspectives on teaching the Holocaust

Article

Jul 2018

Lisa Pennington

Museums often cite supporting teachers and schools as a goal, and museum educators frequently create resources or provide professional development for this audience, though the two entities have little contact. This qualitative study sought to examine the perspectives of museum educators at a regional Holocaust museum as they planned and presented two-week-long professional development workshops for educators. Pre-workshop and post-workshop interviews were conducted with three museum educators responsible for the workshops, which were also observed in their entirety. Findings indicate that all three museum educators believed the Holocaust to be difficult knowledge. However, each approached the topic in a different manner based on their personal experience and understanding of Holocaust education, resulting in three vastly different presentation styles. These varied presentations resulted in an uneven focus on content, with few concrete classroom connections. The article concludes by discussing implications for museum-initiated professional development and avenues for further research.

Instagram and Auschwitz: a critical assessment of the impact social media has on Holocaust representation

Article

May 2018

The paper critically discusses the various types of engagements young people are having around Holocaust remembrance on Instagram, specifically using the hashtag #Auschwitz. Although this dialogue is not straightforward or without issue, we argue that young people’s online engagements with sites of trauma – in this case Instagram and #Auschwitz – opens important avenues for debates on Holocaust remembrance, but also a space where images continue to generate visibility of the horrors of the Holocaust for future generations. Importantly, we maintain that social media can give young people voice and place in debates, which they may feel they cannot be part of in more formal contexts.

‘Beyond words’: representing the ‘Holocaust by bullets’

Article

May 2018

Sue Vice

This article considers the reasons for the paucity, by contrast to the literature of the wartime ghettos and camps, of cultural representations of the Einsatzgruppen murders. It does so by analysing those representations that do exist, in the form of memoirs, poetry and fiction by eyewitnesses and survivors, as well as a diary kept by a bystander to these mass shootings. The article concludes by asking whether very nature of these murders means that they are all but unrepresentable.

Presenting and Teaching the Past

Chapter

Mar 2018

This chapter addresses the topic of presenting and teaching the past over the course of time with an emphasis on the remembrance of the Holocaust in different countries and in a global context. It focuses on four aspects: educational media (school books and curricula in particular); museums of the Holocaust; television and films; and the Internet. During the last decades a plethora of new research and presentation approaches on the Holocaust has emerged. This development is indicative of a dynamic international interest and a paradigm shift.

Collective memory and social media: Fostering a new historical consciousness in the digital age?

Article

Jan 2018

The impact of social media has grown significantly during the past decade in several fields of our society. This article advocates the research subfield of social media memory studies based on empirical data from a case study on the role of social media in a local conflict about re-naming a public square in an average German town. The square had been named after Paul von Hindenburg, who played a crucial role in the implementation of Adolf Hitler as German Reichskanzler and was therefore regarded as an inadequate public patron. Conservatives fought against the new name, also on Facebook. Our findings indicate that the platform played a decisive role as counter-public sphere against hegemonic mainstream media and politics in fostering a new historical consciousness. The case might be seen as a precedent of right-wing movements and their use of social media in the Brexit campaign or the US elections.

Introduction: The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945

Chapter

Jan 2016

Archiving the gaze: Relation-images, adaptation, and digital mnemotechnologies

Chapter

May 2009

B. Lessard

What is digital memory? How are digital technologies changing what we remember and how? Records of the past used to be expensive and bulky to keep, and difficult to access. But digital media technologies provide cheap data storage and easy data retrieval, with mobile networks enabling unprecedented global accessibility and participation in the creation of memories. Save As⁵ Digital Memories brings together leading international scholars to address on-line memorials, blogging, mobile phones, social networking sites and the digital archive. They focus on topical subjects such the 'war on terror', cyberpunk, the Holocaust, digital remixing and the virtual museum. Trans-disciplinary and original, the book will appeal to those interested in how digital media technologies shape human memory. Providing an accessible and bold introduction to the subject of digital memory, each essay shows how digital technologies are changing human memory discourses, practices and forms, as well as the way we conceptualise memory itself.

Soft Denial in Different Political and Social Areas on the Web

Chapter

Apr 2017

Juliane Wetzel

This chapter is concerned not so much with Holocaust denial in those European countries where it is an offense, but rather examines the various and different forms of trivialization of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. This trivialization of the Nazi genocide does not always occur with the intention of diminishing it but rather with the intention of using the Holocaust to draw attention to political or social issues, such as abortion, mass animal transports and so on or, indeed, simply to serve as an advertising ploy. Those who use such a clearly loaded historical term in order to dramatically publicize their concerns usually do so not to defame or discredit Jews. This is different to what is often referred to as ‘Holocaust distortion’ in which a reversal of perpetrator-victim depicts Israel as the ‘new Nazis’ and puts ‘the Jews’ in general under general suspicion for all the evil in the world and in particular for the conflict in the Middle East. In this instance, the conduct of the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government’s policy is equated with Nazi persecution. The terms ‘Holocaust inversion’ and ‘Holocaust equivalence’ thus describe a situation in which Israel is delegitimized because the government or the military are accused of behaving toward the Palestinians in the same way as the Nazis had against the Jews, leading to the ‘annihilation’ of the Palestinians.

Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era

Article

Jan 2015

Selfies, Self-Witnessing and the ‘Out-of-Place’ Digital Citizen

Chapter

Jan 2017

Mark Nunes

The placemaking selfie documents a complex relationship between embodied social context and networked social media presence. The complexity of these placemaking selfies is particularly apparent in the ‘out-of-place’ selfie, taken at a location considered too austere for what is often cast as a frivolous act. Rather than moving to quickly condemn these out-of-place selfies, this chapter explores how we might read such gestures as attempts to negotiate two overlapping frames – one embodied and physically situated, and the other circulating within an affective imagined community. This act of ‘self-witnessing’ serves as a form of parasocial civic engagement that attempts to communicate one’s own place within interpenetrating social spaces, no matter how gawking or disengaged they may appear at first analysis.

Bridging cultural studies and learning science: An investigation of social media use for Holocaust memory and education in the digital age

Abstract

No full-text available

Recommended publications

The Use of Media in the Dissemination of Development Information in Kaitetu Village

An Analysis on the Coverage of Kirkit Weaving Art, One of Our Cultural Values, in Turkish Social Med...

Slang As A Cross-Generational Language and Its Influence On Indonesian Language In The Digital Era:...

THE NECESSITY OF A COLLABORATIVE COMMUNICATION MODEL: AN ANALYSIS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CONCEPTS OF...