Memory Project Research Articles

Shahids and martyrs: Conflicting national narratives and places of memory in Kosovo

Kosovo Field (Kosovo Polje), the core region of the newly independent Kosovo, experienced several key historical events, each of which left important memories in the space. As political control over territory changed, different memories connected to the area became stronger, while others were pushed into the background. The first battle of Kosovo (1389) and the death of their ruler Lazar, is a key event in Serbian history, identified through spectacular landmarks in the region. Connected to this event, Turkish monuments also exist, commemorating the death of the martyr Sultan Murad I. Following independence, memorials of Albanian fighters started mushrooming as a core element of Kosovar identity building, with the martyrdom of the “legendary commander” Adem Jashari being central to this emblematic memory project. All three nations have an “official” martyr connected to the space, around which different nation-building narratives have been constructed. As the struggle over the control and influence of the region continues, so does the competition of different memories and memorials. Territorialisation and de-territorialisation of memories are ongoing projects in the country by the three nations, linked to competing nation-buildings and political power struggles.

“Troublesome Performers, Beautiful Fighters”: Bringing to Life the Kolonial-Ausstellung of 1896 at the Museum and Beyond

In 2017 the exhibition ZurückGESCHAUT, produced by the district Museum Treptow in Berlin, made history when it partnered with antiracist organizations to tell the story of participants in a Völkerschau that had taken place in 1896. It was the first time that a German museum incorporated a critical view of German colonialism in its permanent exhibition and interwove local and global history. The exhibition inspired an artistic audio project, ZurückERZÄHLT (2019), and was subsequently revised (2021). The three projects grappled very differently with challenging source material, a set of anthropological photographs of participants. The article analyses the choices made by museum curators, activists, and artists who cooperated in these innovative, interlocking memory projects. It argues that the cooperation helped the museum relate the hard truths of colonial violence without reproducing that violence in the exhibition space.

Continual learning for seizure prediction via memory projection strategy

Despite extensive algorithms for epilepsy prediction via machine learning, most models are tailored for offline scenarios and cannot handle actual scenarios where data changes over time. Catastrophic forgetting(CF) for learned electroencephalogram(EEG) data occurs when EEG changes dynamically in the clinical setting. This paper implements a continual learning(CL) strategy Memory Projection(MP) for epilepsy prediction, which can be combined with other algorithms to avoid CF. Such a strategy enables the model to learn EEG data from each patient in dynamic subspaces with weak correlation layer by layer to minimize interference and promote knowledge transfer. Regularization Loss Reconstruction Algorithm and Matrix Dimensionality Reduction Algorithm are introduced into the core of MP. Experimental results show that MP exhibits excellent performance and low forgetting rates in sequential learning of seizure prediction. The forgetting rate of accuracy and sensitivity under multiple experiments are below 5%. When learning from multi-center datasets, the forgetting rates for accuracy and sensitivity decrease to 0.65% and 1.86%, making it comparable to state-of-the-art CL strategies. Through ablation experiments, we have analyzed that MP can operate with minimal storage and computational cost, which demonstrates practical potential for seizure prediction in clinical scenarios.

Local Australian memory activism and the fast and slow violence of institutional abuse

ABSTRACT This article investigates unofficial memory projects that have arisen in Australia in response to the institutional abuse of children. While the role of activists in pushing for the enactment of state responses is beginning to be understood, activist demands for recognition have taken a multitude of forms beyond this. Unofficial memory projects are indicative of this, exemplified by a diverse range of publicly situated cultural forms that re-present abuse to wider audiences. Focusing on two examples that have arisen in Australia in recent years – the grassroots phenomenon known as Loud Fence that grew out of the Victorian town of Ballarat, and the Australian Orphanage Museum that was established by Care leavers in 2023 – I examine these as examples of memory activism which generate counter-archives of institutional violence against children. Loud Fence does so upon institutional fences at the level of the streetscape, while the AOM does so by curating a museum space that honours the experiences of childhood ‘Care’. Seeking to decentre the state from this analysis, I demonstrate how such examples enliven the fast and slow violence of child abuse and neglect, and the role of non-state actors when it comes to the recalibration of collective memory.

Automated Registration of Full Moon Remote Sensing Images Based on Triangulated Network Constraints

Abstract. The registration of full-moon remote sensing images constitutes a pivotal stage in the fusion analysis of multiple lunar remote sensing datasets. Addressing prevailing issues in automatic registration, such as the broad width of full-moon data, significant internal distortion, and texture distortion in high-latitude regions, this paper proposes a method for automatic matching and correction based on triangulation constraints. The approach employs a matching strategy progressing from coarse to fine and from sparse to dense. It optimizes and combines multiple existing matching algorithms, enhances the extraction of initial network points, constructs irregular triangulation networks using these points, conducts dense matching with each triangulation network as a basic unit, and introduces a geometric correction method based on triangulation network + grid (TIN + GRID) for the registration of full-moon data. For the matching of full-moon remote sensing images in high-latitude regions, a novel approach involving memory projection forward transformation-matching-projection inverse transformation is adopted. Through registration experiments with full-moon image data and an analysis of registration accuracy at different latitudes, the average mean square error is found to be less than 2 pixels. These results signify the efficacy of the proposed method in effectively addressing the automatic registration challenges encountered in full-moon remote sensing images.

De-Exceptionalizing Pandemic Death in the United States: COVID-19’s Ambiguous and Layered Mourning

ABSTRACT: In the spring and early summer of 2020, mainstream media in the United States announced the “death of ritual” as public officials limited communities from gathering to care for their deceased—whether COVID-19 victims or people who happened to die during this first wave of pandemic restriction. From backlogged funeral homes and crematoria to bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks and families scrambling to find their deceased, headlines seemed to augur an unprecedented condition of interrupted or derailed mourning. But how singular was this moment? On the one hand, funeral directors were telling a different story, reminding us that they’d been here before when the stigma of HIV/AIDS robbed the deceased and their loved ones of expected ritual care. On the other, as scholars of post-conflict societies and missing migrants can attest, COVID-19 was by no means unique in disrupting the pace and order of mourning. This piece challenges the characterization of pandemic death in the United States, especially in the first waves of infection, as exceptional because of what it glosses over: the predictability of which bodies and whose lives routinely pay the highest tolls. Instead, we reflect on the temporality of incomplete and curtailed care by juxtaposing the pandemic’s seemingly singular chronotope—born from the politicized bodies of the living as much as the dead—with the exigencies of uncertain death that surround missing persons of conflicts and borders. Seemingly punctuated events like wars and pandemics that give rise to aberrant death throw timelines into disarray; they also expose what underlies and endures: longstanding inequities to conditions that secure life in the first place. Thus, challenging this notion of presumed exceptionalism, we argue that the US experience of pandemic death and mourning throws into relief—at least temporarily—its systems of domination and invites a closer look at the intertwining projects of memory and political transformation.

The City as an Archive of Doing and Undoing: The Case of Istanbul's Atatürk Cultural Center

Abstract: This article traces the recent debates around the preservation or demolition of the Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM) in Istanbul's Taksim Square as a case example of urban visual memorial projects. In doing so, it argues that the city of Istanbul, and Taksim Square in particular, archive processes of political doing and undoing, with implications on the claims to public life and political futurity. Not only a site of compulsive preservation, the archive is also an expression of the drive to incorporate the memorable or to annihilate its very possibility. As such, the discourse over AKM and its evocations of remembering, forgetting, ruin, or renovation, position it as an especially poignant cultural artifact, bringing into visibility the politicity of the city as an archive that chronicles its own internal incongruence.

REGIONAL AND CENTRAL DIMENSION OF STATE POLICY OF MEMORY IN THE LATE SOVIET PERIOD

The two major late-Soviet memorial policy projects, “Hero Cities” and “Golden Ring”, had many differences as well as points of intersection in terms of their emergence and development. Each of them appealed to a specific sample of regions, and the struggle for inclusion in the projects was fought at the union, republican, and regional levels. Both were “showcase” destinations for domestic and foreign tourism. E.M. Boltunova and G.S. Yegorova’s monograph “Territory and History: Late Soviet Projects Hero Cities and Golden Ring” makes a significant contribution to the study of two memorial projects of late Soviet society, which provided for it more than new places of memory and tourist routes: they formed alternative foundation myths that competed with the underlying Soviet narrative. The novelty of the monograph is the task of finding points of intersection in the history of seemingly completely unrelated projects: E.M. Boltunova and G.S. Yegorova’s work is about how society and power searched for and created new national meanings and reference points. The cities marked with the title of “Hero Cities” began to be gradually correlated in public historical memory with the territories of the most important battles of the Great Patriotic War, while a number of cities and regions that “fell out” of this project found themselves outside the program of state memorialization of the war 1941-1945. The issue of composition and boundaries also became one of the key aspects of the Golden Ring route development. Representatives of each region tried to justify as convincingly as possible the necessity to pay attention to this or that city or district when implementing the project, as the inclusion of a city in the route would allow the corresponding region to get additional resources for development. The authors of the monograph dwell in detail on the mutual influence of the projects at the level of narratives and visual components, as well as on the self-positioning of the territories included in the projects and their perception.

Digital memory construction in Lijiang

Purpose The ancient town of Lijiang is a representative place of ethnic minorities in China’s southwest border area jointly built by many ethnic groups. Its rich and diversified history, culture and architecture as well as its artistic and spiritual values need to be better retained and explored.Design/methodology/approach The protection and inheritance of Lijiang’s cultural heritage will be improved through the construction of digital memory resources. To guide Lijiang’s digital memory construction, this study explores strategies of digital memory construction by analyzing four case studies of well-known memory projects from China and America.Findings From the case studies analysis, factors of digital memory construction were identified and compared. Factors led to the discussion of strategies for constructing the digital memory of Lijiang within its design, construction and service phases.Originality/value The ancient town of Lijiang is a famous historical and cultural city in China, and it is also a representative place of ethnic minorities in the border area jointly built by many ethnic groups. The rich culture should be preserved and digitalized to offer better use for the whole nation.

Producing Truth: Public Memory Projects in Post-Violence Societies

ABSTRACT: How do societies remember historical political violence? We draw on an original dataset of more than 150 memorialization projects proposed by truth commissions in 28 post-violence countries, from 1970 to 2018. These projects include the removal of monuments, installation of museums, inauguration of national days of remembrance, and more. Truth commission recommendations data allows us to not only consider memory sites once established, but also to examine blueprints for the types of memory that could have been made. We develop a typology and inductively generate a theory of the political contests and conflicts that different memory projects are likely to trigger—contests and conflicts that we expect influence the likelihood of project initiation and completion. We conduct an initial probe of the theory using our new data. In so doing, we offer the first systematic, global study of setting and implementing the memorialization agenda in post-violence societies.

On Archipelagic Memory: A Conversation with Michael Rothberg and Vijaya Teelock

On February 1, 2022, the online seminar “Conceptualising Archipelagic Memory” was organized as the curtain-raiser event for the Archipelagic Memory project and the international conference that took place in August of the same year. The seminar brought together Professors Michael Rothberg and Vijaya Teelock, in conversation with Ananya Kabir, to initiate a discussion on practices of memory-making in archipelagic spaces and through archipelagic structures, and on the meanings and possibilities embedded in the notion of “archipelagic memory.” In this annotated transcript of the conversation, Rothberg and Teelock reflect with Kabir on their research trajectories and expertise, provoking new models of analysis constitutive of an archipelagic approach to Indian Ocean cultural history.

Commemorative Practices During the War: Bohdan Mazur’s project Memory of Civilian Victims

The article explores actual issues related to the memorial aspect of commemorating the fallen civilians of Ukraine as a result of russian aggression, focusing on the creative aspects of the commemorative issue in the space of urban architecture and forms of social communication aimed at creating such memorial zones as a part of the collective memory and commemorative policy of the state as a whole. The aim of the paper is to analyze creative practices and socio-cultural (institutional) interactions that strive to implement memorial cultural policy during the war. The subject field of the article is the practical implementation of the idea of the memorial architectural project In Memory of Civilian Victims by Bohdan Mazur, a famous Ukrainian sculptor. It is on the example of the implementation of B. Mazur’s memorial project that the author highlights contradictory approaches and views, problem areas of this project’s implementation: from the forms of memorialization of tragic events to the ways of communicating with authorities, opinion leaders, and professional experts on this issue in the context of wartime.

만화자료 활용을 통한 지역 민주의거 교육의 확산 전략 제언

In this study, we analyzed the narrative strategy and expression method of the learning cartoon 『Fireworks』, which was planned and published by the 3‧8 Democratic Movement Commemorative Association, and present a strategy to spread local democratic uprising education. Because of the functional characteristics of comics that allow them to be visually communicated easily and quickly, various learning materials are reproduced as comic content and are widely used in educational settings and textbooks. In addition, cartoon content has the advantage of not only stimulating learners' imagination, but also arousing interest in learners by utilizing various visual effects. 『Fireworks』depicts in an easy-to-understand manner the development process of the Daejeon March 8 Democratic Uprising, which became the beginning of the April 19 Revolution. Above all, this work guarantees sufficient objectivity because it was published by the 3‧8 Democratic Movement Association with support from Daejeon Metropolitan City. Of course, due to the nature of being a cartoon, there may be some elements of the author's imagination, but as a result of cross-examination and testimony of the participants at the time, it is largely based on reality. The publication of 『Fireworks』is very meaningful because it depicts the democratic uprising unique to the Daejeon region in a realistic manner, guaranteeing objectivity. In particular, the transformation of fictional and real people in the character settings stands out. This is especially true considering that the democratization movement is not the exclusive property of specific individuals or groups, but is the product of everyone who lived at that time. In addition, this work reveals relatively clearly the background of the rebellion and the core of the development process by date around March 8, 1960. It is believed that these characteristics can sufficiently contribute to making it easier for 『Fireworks』to publicize the 3‧8 Democratic Movement and educate people about the contents of the uprising. This work is a learning cartoon directly planned and published by the 3‧8 Democratic Movement Memorial Association (incorporated association) with support from Daejeon Metropolitan City. Accordingly, there is a need to establish a concrete plan to distribute the learning comic 『Fireworks』to schools through cooperation between the Daejeon Office of Education and the March 8th Memorial Project Association.

Creating value from intangible cultural heritage—the role of innovation for sustainable tourism and regional rural development

Based on evidence from two exploratory case studies, the article examines how intangible cultural heritage can promote sustainable rural development by creating value for rural communities. The studied communities in Bavaria, Germany, and Le Marche, Italy, are closely tied to traditional agricultural practices and their historical legacies. In the German case study, alpine pasture farming has sustained its cultural landscape and tourism for generations, while in the Italian case, the rural sharecropping legacy evolved into a culinary heritage project. Bad Hindelang (Germany) stands out as a mature destination with a long history of sustainable tourism, achieved through collaboration between farmers, conservationists, and the local community. The region balances tourism, conservation, and ecological farming through community participation and collective action. In contrast, Le Marche region (Italy) has only recently experienced increasing numbers of international tourists, but seems well-situated to exploit opportunities for cultural and culinary tourism development. The Marche Food and Wine Memories project has preserved the oral memories and the culinary heritage of former sharecroppers, yet economic value for the region has so far been limited. Post-COVID-19, the region may benefit from increased demand for tourism in culturally appealing, authentic and less crowded destinations. The article emphasises that intangible cultural heritage can enrich the quality of life of local residents and enhance visitors’ experiential value. Innovative approaches like storytelling and participatory engagement make these cultural expressions accessible to wider audiences, including tourists, thus benefiting heritage communities in various ways. Both cases highlight the role of innovation, with Bad Hindelang’s eco-model promoting ecological farming and Le Marche’s project preserving sharecroppers’ heritage through corporate heritage marketing. Collaboration among various stakeholders has been a key to success in both cases. The article also illustrates the range of functions fulfilled by intangible cultural heritage, from restoring social dignity to maintaining landscape aesthetics and ecological integrity.

Constructions of Racial Savagery in Early Twentieth-Century US Narratives of White Civilization

This article examines the constructions of Black “degeneracy” through which white Americans rationalized Jim Crow terror. Ruminations on African Americans’ supposed downward trajectory, I argue, drew relational meaning from a range of colonial discourses. Claims that African Americans were deteriorating outside the bonds of enslavement were articulated within wider transnational imperialist discourses circulating in this period that imagined that the world's savage peoples were destined to recede in the march of civilization. Here, I examine white Americans’ narratives of African American degeneration through two other imagined hemispheric encounters between white civilization and savagery. In the article's first half, I consider images of Haiti employed in cultural and political texts to signify the durability of innate Black savagery and the apocalyptic potential of Black freedom. In the second half, I consider discourses of Black degeneration in freedom alongside the genocidal construction of the “vanishing Indian.” I focus on two memorial projects: the 1931 monument to the Faithful Slave erected in Harpers Ferry and the never-completed National American Indian Memorial, for which ground was broken in 1913 at Fort Wadsworth.

The Advanced BRain Imaging on ageing and Memory (ABRIM) data collection: Study design, data processing, and rationale.

To understand the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie heterogeneity in cognitive ageing, recent scientific efforts have led to a growing public availability of imaging cohort data. The Advanced BRain Imaging on ageing and Memory (ABRIM) project aims to add to these existing datasets by taking an adult lifespan approach to provide a cross-sectional, normative database with a particular focus on connectivity, myelinization and iron content of the brain in concurrence with cognitive functioning, mechanisms of reserve, and sleep-wake rhythms. ABRIM freely shares MRI and behavioural data from 295 participants between 18-80 years, stratified by age decade and sex (median age 52, IQR 36-66, 53.20% females). The ABRIM MRI collection consists of both the raw and pre-processed structural and functional MRI data to facilitate data usage among both expert and non-expert users. The ABRIM behavioural collection includes measures of cognitive functioning (i.e., global cognition, processing speed, executive functions, and memory), proxy measures of cognitive reserve (e.g., educational attainment, verbal intelligence, and occupational complexity), and various self-reported questionnaires (e.g., on depressive symptoms, pain, and the use of memory strategies in daily life and during a memory task). In a sub-sample (n = 120), we recorded sleep-wake rhythms using an actigraphy device (Actiwatch 2, Philips Respironics) for a period of 7 consecutive days. Here, we provide an in-depth description of our study protocol, pre-processing pipelines, and data availability. ABRIM provides a cross-sectional database on healthy participants throughout the adult lifespan, including numerous parameters relevant to improve our understanding of cognitive ageing. Therefore, ABRIM enables researchers to model the advanced imaging parameters and cognitive topologies as a function of age, identify the normal range of values of such parameters, and to further investigate the diverse mechanisms of reserve and resilience.

The Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project: Archiving as Testimony, as Evidence, as Creative Practice

Founded in 2014, the Syrian Archive is a collective of human rights activists dedicated to curating visual documentation of human rights violations and other crimes committed during the conflict in Syria. Working within the context of the Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project and building on a series of interviews which took place between 2018 and 2022 with 40 photographers and videographers based in Syria or in the diaspora, this article explores the main motivations behind Syrians’ documentation of the uprising/war since 2011. It articulates the potential of this crowd-sourced archive of the uprising-war across three main spaces: its testimonial and historical, its evidentiary, and its creative value. Across all three spaces, the Digital Memory Project, and by extension this article, advocate for the creation of a space where reflections on the value of crowd-sourced archives can happen in their authors’ own voices, rather than on their behalf.

Establishment of the Tongyeong(統營) Chungryulsa Permanent Preservation Society(忠烈祠永久保存會) and the General Yi Sun-sin(李舜臣) Memorial Project in Colonial Period

Establishment of the Tongyeong(統營) Chungryulsa Permanent Preservation Society(忠烈祠永久保存會) and the General Yi Sun-sin(李舜臣) Memorial Project in Colonial Period

Migrants, transcultural memory and World War I commemoration in post-conflict Northern Ireland

This article explores a community memory project on World War I led by first-generation migrants living in Northern Ireland. As a location recovering from 30 years of political violence, debates on commemoration are frequently reduced to the bi-partisan lens of Irish nationalism or British unionism. World War I is one episode often interpreted through this exclusivist framework. Recent immigration, however, raises questions as to how those who are neither nationalist nor unionist can partake in public memory debates. Drawing on the project’s experiences, I argue that incorporating migrants’ worldviews on the past can elucidate important transcultural analysis and positively aid in reframing simplistic ethno-national interpretations. Transcultural methods can illuminate cross-cultural themes and explicate differences and similarities across multiple groups rather than just two historically divided communities. Thus, transcultural approaches offer a novel means of generating holistic dialogue on memory which has transformative potential for a society transitioning from conflict to peace.

El rescate de la memoria en tiempos de pandemia. Los proyectos de cooperación internacional en archivos documentales y orales gestionados por el Lugar de la Memoria (Perú, 2019-2022)

The Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (LUM) is a national memory space located in Lima and has the purpose of dignifying the victims of the period of violence (1980-2000). The leading role that archives have as historical sources for the study of this era was a reason for the LUM to articulate efforts and initiatives to finance international cooperation projects. The support obtained was vital because Peru was in the midst of a pandemic context and difficulties due to its current political and economic situation. In this sense, the experiences with the German Gerda Henkel Foundation will be presented to carry out a comprehensive redesign of the virtual platform of the LUM Documentation and Research Center and the drive to rescue 12 testimonies from the Narrators of Memories project as oral sources for research, both linked to the tireless task of promoting greater reflection and historical memory.