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

Stefania Manca

doi:10.3390/info12010031

Abstract

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.

Highlights

With the advent of increasingly sophisticated communication technologies and with progressive temporal departure from the historical circumstances that marked the “destruction of European Jewry” [1] about 80 years ago, the employment of digital technology has emerged as a specific topic of research in the field of Holocaust studies
This study aims to provide a preliminary analysis of social media engagement in three major Holocaust museums: Yad Vashem (YV) in Israel, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum (AMM)
In addition to social media analytics metrics, this study considered latent semantic analysis (LSA) [64]

Summary

Introduction

With the advent of increasingly sophisticated communication technologies and with progressive temporal departure from the historical circumstances that marked the “destruction of European Jewry” [1] about 80 years ago, the employment of digital technology has emerged as a specific topic of research in the field of Holocaust studies. Progressive diminishment of the witness era [4] has further marked the need to preserve testimonies through digital means One such initiative, the New Dimensions in Testimony, gathers a collection of survivor testimonies in interactive 3D format in a quest to safeguard the possibility of real-time, question-and-answer virtual dialogue with survivors to learn about and appreciate their life experiences [5,6]. The New Dimensions in Testimony, gathers a collection of survivor testimonies in interactive 3D format in a quest to safeguard the possibility of real-time, question-and-answer virtual dialogue with survivors to learn about and appreciate their life experiences [5,6] In this vein, the idea of a “virtual Holocaust memory” has advanced, embracing both digital and non-digital memory related to the Holocaust and, at the same time, drawing attention to the pervasive nature of the virtuality of memory itself [7]

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