Bringing Together the Digital with Research, Teaching, and Conservation

Abstract

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum recognizes the increasing importance and use of Digital Humanities (DH) in Holocaust research, teaching, and conservation. To that end, the Museum instituted the Material Culture and the Holocaust Initiative (MCHI) in 2018 to explore the state-of-the-art approaches in material-culture research that could create new opportunities for Holocaust scholars, teachers, and conservators. MCHI requires large-scale collaboration to bring in a wide range of expertise from across the institution and beyond. MCHI explores the nexus of historical knowledge, technical art history, conservation, and archeological practices within emerging technologies. Specifically, the Initiative is investigating how digital collection and representation of artefacts can aid Holocaust scholars, teachers, and conservators in their work, recognizing that they all have different perspectives and demands in terms of resolution, interactivity, and capability. The three authors represent three different contributions to the cooperation and discuss the goals, objectives, and preliminary results of this collaboration. One of the program’s initial conclusions is to recognize the need to treat data as fully articulated data objects that can be used for computational and scientific analysis, technical history, and advanced instructional tools rather than as just surrogates of the originals. Equally important, is the construction of interoperable systems with equivalent approaches to data at other institutions, so that computer actionable datasets can be easily combined, mined, and used in collaborative projects among geographically distant teams. This effort would not only dramatically increase the research, teaching, and conservation value of these collections but also level the field between large and small institutions for access to the material culture of the Holocaust and eliminate the potentially controversial collection by any one institution of Holocaust-era artefacts, as well as respect national and international cultural heritage laws. MCHI also demonstrates the importance of pandisciplinary cooperation and the need to collaborate to create shared vocabulary and experimentation with new uses for old and new technologies.