Welcome to Digital Visual History @HUJI
Digital Visual History @HUJI is a research cluster that deals with a variety of questions related to transforming forms of writing history and commemorating the past in the digital age.
Digitization of historical documents and sources, digital repositories and archives, advanced search engines, interactive online exhibitions, virtual and augmented reality applications, social media: all these technologies, applications, infrastructures and digital environments have an impact on the way we are approaching the past in the digital age. In the context of our research cluster Digital Visual History we are engaging with a variety of aspects related to these rapidly transforming media and memory ecologies.
In our classes and research projects at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem we are dealing with topics such as the audiovisual, digital and Social Media memory of the Holocaust, with the visual history of the GDR, with audiovisual digital humanities, with the archeology of filmic icons from the Nazi past. We are collaborating in several international projects such as the Horizon 2020 research and innovation action Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age and the DFG-project (Con)sequential Images – An archeology of iconic film footage from the Nazi era. We are also initiating new research on timely topics such as our research on the Transformation of Holocaust Memory in Times of COVID 19. We are also cooperating with other projects and activists in our field such as the Commemorations Archive Project initiated by Digital Holocaust Memory.
On our blog we are sharing information about our research and offer a space for young researchers to contribute insights from research seminars. We also introduce current publications on related topics that were authored by members of our team or by other researchers. Some of our most recent publications dealt with the Instagram Stories Holocaust commemoration project Eva Stories as a new form of social media witnessing, with memorials for victims of far right violence as discursive spheres, and with commemorating the Holocaust from a distance in the wake of COVID-19. Newspaper articles discussed controversial topics such as the Holocaust-challenge on the social media platform TikTok or new forms of Holocaust commemoration during the pandemic. We also prepared a series of audiovisual essays, video lectures, podcasts and digital walkthrough videos on Global Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age, and contributed to the Smart Family Institute for Communication podcast series SIP.
The focus of our interdisciplinary research in the field of Digital Visual History is on:
- Digital curation
- Mapping relations
- Social media memory
- Visual historiography and archeology
- Digital storytelling (including audiovisual essays)
Digital Visual History @HUJI 