Memory Project Research Articles

THE VIRGINIA MEMORY PROJECT: AN INNOVATIVE SERVICE AND EPIDEMIOLOGICAL BRAIN HEALTH REGISTRY

Abstract The Virginia Memory Project (VMP) is a statewide memory loss and caregiving needs registry in Virginia, United States. The VMP was launched in June of 2022 and supports statewide surveillance efforts via expanding the BRFSS (Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) memory loss and caregiving modules via a digitized, mobile-capable online survey. In addition to collecting BRFSS data, the VMP partners with regional community brain health organizations to support respondents in getting connected to brain health and caregiving services. The VMP model is innovative because it combines a service and epidemiological registry to support improved resource allocation and decision-making in Statewide dementia care planning. It also provides a pathway for caregiving and memory loss services. In the pilot period of the VMP, there were 138 respondents, with a median age of 61, mean=58, range=18-100, and most respondents identified as White 65% (n=99), with smaller proportions of Black/AA, 16.7% (n=22), and Asian 5.3% (n=7). 96.2% of respondents were non-Hispanic. Most respondents were married (n=66, 50.4%) with no children in the home (77.9%), and 26.7% (n=35) provided contact information for potential brain health or caregiving services. For respondents who completed the memory loss module, 33% (n=26) reported memory loss or confusion worsening over the last year, but only 60% (n=15) had discussed symptoms with a healthcare professional. 33.3% (n=24) reported having caregiving responsibilities. The VMP increases brain health surveillance capacity in Virginia and represents an innovative pathway between a state department of health, a university data registry, and a community service provider.

Macroscopic resting-state brain dynamics are best described by linear models

It is typically assumed that large networks of neurons exhibit a large repertoire of nonlinear behaviours. Here we challenge this assumption by leveraging mathematical models derived from measurements of local field potentials via intracranial electroencephalography and of whole-brain blood-oxygen-level-dependent brain activity via functional magnetic resonance imaging. We used state-of-the-art linear and nonlinear families of models to describe spontaneous resting-state activity of 700 participants in the Human Connectome Project and 122 participants in the Restoring Active Memory project. We found that linear autoregressive models provide the best fit across both data types and three performance metrics: predictive power, computational complexity and the extent of the residual dynamics unexplained by the model. To explain this observation, we show that microscopic nonlinear dynamics can be counteracted or masked by four factors associated with macroscopic dynamics: averaging over space and over time, which are inherent to aggregated macroscopic brain activity, and observation noise and limited data samples, which stem from technological limitations. We therefore argue that easier-to-interpret linear models can faithfully describe macroscopic brain dynamics during resting-state conditions.

Memory studies and design? The mnemotopic approach

At the beginning of the fourth wave of memory studies, the relationship with design appears poorly explored, although the memory project is fundamental for the contemporary and interdisciplinary past reframing. From this perspective, the article proposes an intrinsic but not yet evident link between memory studies and communication design for the territory, a young discipline that has taken up the “stratified place” as its own specific dimension, focusing on its valorization and visual translation. This novel connection is highlighted by the mnemotopic approach in which place and memory coexist in a unique meaning formation, supporting the remembrance of the territorial experience. Through a lexical transfer of the term mnemotope, generally used in other fields of knowledge (e.g. cultural anthropology), to design, it becomes a performative concept integrated into processes and artifacts as an active part of project development. The mnemotope as a plural object of territorial interpretation, sailing from Nora’s lieux de memoire, passing through Assmann’s cultural memory reflections, and landing in communication design, can be adopted as an alternative interpretative criterion that not only proposes a resematization of the memory of places but can be considered as a real medium for exploring the past that can also operate on a didactic level by being included in experimental design courses. In this context, the article will show how the mnemotopic approach has been developed during my personal doctoral journey and pedagogically implemented by the DCxT research group of the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano.

The Power of Personal Archives in Witnessing, Teaching, and Visual Storytelling: The Armenian Memory Project

Abstract The Armenian Memory Project (AMP) is a collaborative effort designed to harness the energy and resources of the University of Connecticut and the New England Armenian community for the goal of fostering greater understanding of the region’s Armenian cultural heritage and the impact human rights crimes had on the Armenian community. In 2019, students and faculty from the university worked with Armenian American institutions and individuals on an initial component of the AMP, employing digital media technology to tell the story of one immigrant Armenian family, the Dildilians. A unique course was created to produce a documentary film centring around this family’s experiences in Ottoman Turkey before, during, and after the Armenian Genocide. Designed and taught by a documentary filmmaker with support from a family archivist/historian, the course brought students together in a collaborative learning experience. By immersing themselves in the family’s extensive photograph archive, these students came to understand the important role that the past continues to play in the lives of present-day Armenians. Furthermore, by taking on the responsibility as storytellers of the Dildilian narrative, students developed a deeper identification with this distant history and, in a wider sense, an appreciation for the ethical value of memory in bearing witness to the past. This collaborative and participatory framework for teaching using archival collections can serve as a model for creating a transformative learning experience in the study of human rights, war, and genocide.

Seekingnormalitàin Alberto Moravia’sIl conformista: Towards an Italian history of the homosexual fascist in postwar memory

This article analyzes the figure of the homosexual fascist, the ‘homo-fascist,’ in postwar cultural memory through the lens of Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel Il conformista ( The Conformist). Il conformista exemplifies the place of the homo-fascist narrative in crafting postwar cultural discourses around fascism, especially in the Italian case. Beginning from a close reading of the text combined with analysis of its historical context, the article deconstructs the narrative's interpretive logic to identify the many politically convenient fictions the homo-fascist offered within the growing project of postwar memory. These fictions, as embodied in the homo-fascist, facilitated the dual condemnation and excusal of fascism as the pathological weakness of the separate few, not the collective many. This analysis illuminates the often-overlooked historical role that narratives of homosexuality have played in the fluid construction of cultural, political, and social memories of fascism and its adherents. Viewing Il conformista within a specifically Italian vein of the narrative distinct from the German, moreover, critically reorients the text within Italy's individual and politically potent relationship to its Fascist past. Understanding the homo-fascist through Il conformista, therefore, enlightens not only the history of the homo-fascist figure, but also the histories of modern Italy, postwar memory culture, and sexual politics.

Увековечение памяти воинов-казахов в Оренбургской и Волгоградской областях

Introduction. The paper investigates interactions between memory projects — both all-Russia ones and those implemented in regions bordering Kazakhstan. Special attention is paid to the unfolding narratives underlying annual commemoration ceremonies in Orenburg and Volgograd oblasts for Yestekbay Batyr (hero of war against Dzungars) and for soldiers/officers who participated in the Great Patriotic War, military conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Goals. The work aims to describe memorial objects associated with individuals who performed exploits for the sake of their compatriots, and to analyze commemorative practices carried out by local communities. Results. The article focuses on activities of local Kazakh communities of Orenburg and Volgograd oblasts aimed at memorializing war heroes collected by our research group during field studies of places sacred to Kazakhs, summarizes the authors’ observations and stories recorded from informants. Acts of commemoration for warriors are somewhat re-readings or re-inclusions of the past into the present-day agenda. Such venerations articulate significant ethnic values, norms, and behavioral patterns. The work traces a certain trend towards ‘militarization of consciousness’ in commemorative practices associated with particularly revered places of memory relating to the Great Patriotic War — and in sacralizing names of soldiers/officers who have taken part in local military conflicts.

Walls of resistance: Underground memories and political violence in Colombia

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine ‘underground memories’ to demonstrate how they serve as resources for resistance in the margins of Colombia. I focus on their relations with the urban fabric, looking at the ways the walls of Bogota and Medellin are used as canvases for spreading images and narratives about the conflict. I suggest that murals representing the violence serve as a repository for memories; they challenge hegemonic narratives and contribute to the recovery of public space. This analysis draws on three case studies. In the first one, I examine the impact of a mural in Bogota that denounced extrajudicial killings involving the Colombian army. The second case focuses on a community initiative aimed at collecting testimonies from residents in a marginalized district of Medellin. Finally, the last case study analyses the touristification of some of the many murals depicting the violence in Medellin. I argue that, to different degrees, all the memorial projects presented in this study challenge state narratives. Through representations of murdered teenagers, suspect military officers and even drug cartel bosses, they raise questions of social justice, impunity, illegality and the dramatic banalization of violence in the country. They broaden the narrative on the recent past, through histories and images that the Colombian state is still reluctant to unearth.

Paradise Lost?

This article examines the memorial aesthetics of loss in Madhulika Jalali's documentary film Ghar ka Pata (Home Address, 2021). The article examines the documentary as a memory project made by a Kashmiri Pandit filmmaker of the “1.5 generation”—a woman who left Kashmir with her family at the age of six in the wave of Kashmiri Pandit migrations that followed the beginning of armed rebellion in Kashmir. The article examines the film's memorial aesthetics and politics by attending to the archival features of the film, and shows how the film, in a conventional diasporic mode, reconstructs idealized memories of Kashmir as a “lost paradise,” animating a fading sense of home for the filmmaker and future generations of her family (and, by extension, for future generations of Kashmiri Pandits). But while Ghar ka Pata mobilizes the family's visual archive to document familial loss with great emotional and pedagogical impact, its fixation on vertical genealogical descent at the level of both blood and memory leads it to enshrine a bordered and vulnerable Kashmiri Pandit family, obscuring the violence of the family itself, ruling out a horizontal examination of Kashmiri Pandits' historical relationship to Kashmiri society at large. This in turn curtails other modes of affiliation outside the family that could be much more generative for a future of coexistence in Kashmir.

“Where the Aura of a Tyrant Remains”: Absent Presence and Mnemonic Remains of Socialist-Era Monuments

Abstract This article is dedicated to the absent presence and mnemonic remains of the socialist-era monuments in eastern Europe. Mnemonic remains is a metaphor I employ in this paper to direct our attention to the physical absence of monuments after their removal. But it also speaks of a monument’s role in absentia, its continued existence in and its effects on the collective memory beyond its physical presence. The phenomenon, sporadically acknowledged but rarely subject of investigation in academic literature, is explored and illustrated through the lens of the removed V.I. Lenin monument in Riga. The absent monument, I contend, performs the function of a phantom monument, exerting mnemonic agency beyond its physical presence through its representational value for other memory projects. This is highlighted through the study of the proposed and completed, but never unveiled, monument to Konstantīns Čakste on the site of the former Lenin monument in Riga.

Exploring the Soviet Ukrainian Cinematographer’s Private Photo Archive: Issues of Popularization and Representation

The archive of famous Soviet Ukrainian cinematographer Leonid Burlaka is an example of photography illustrating various spheres of life in Ukraine from the 1960s to the 1990s and has not only historical but also artistic value. In March 2017, the missing part of Leonid Burlaka’s photo archive was discovered in Odessa (Ukraine). Accordingly, the first phase of research was devoted to the analysis of the history of archive discovery, its condition, contents, and the systematization of photographs constituting the archive. In the second stage of the research, another part of the archive was analyzed, which was not lost but preserved by Leonid Burlaka himself and totaled over 300 films. In the process of exploring, the archive raised numerous new issues. How will the further life and preservation of the archive look? What might be the experience of presentation of the archive, its involvement in artistic practices and its influence on collective perception in the post-Soviet period? Currently, the archive forms the basis of the interdisciplinary project Fragile Memory. Therefore, the article touches on several issues: the history of the archive, questions regarding its research, as well as the experience of its popularization, which has been conducted during the past five years within the framework of the Fragile Memory project.

Reconstruction of cultural memory through digital storytelling: A case study of Shanghai Memory project

Abstract This article analyses how digital storytelling (DS) is applied to a digital humanities (DH) research project. It considers the purpose of storytelling and illustrates its use to help to democratize the wider project by including diverse voices and helping to reconstruct cultural memory. How can DS be used as a critical research method to help develop a robust methodology in DH research, particularly for organizing historical and cultural resources to form a story world and addressing biases in the established archival collections? This initiative is the latest phase of the Shanghai Memory project, adding an important additional dimension to the established showcase, A Journey from Wukang Road. Wukang Road, with many historical buildings going back to the colonial era, has important cultural significance as part of the former French Concession. Originally known as Rue de Ferguson, the name was changed in 1943, at the time of the Japanese occupation, seemingly as part of anti-colonial sentiment while China was being encouraged to resist her occupiers. Participation in the storytelling project is facilitated by user generated content and promotion in the Shanghai Library. The aim is to present a clearer storyline about the evolution of Wukang Road, explore its historical context, use the stories and reflections of the ordinary people to balance that of the elites, importantly encouraging inclusion of the vernacular Shanghainese dialect as part of wider movements to protect local languages.

Melody memory project: Increasing dementia awareness through traditional gamelan music

AbstractBackgroundGamelan, a traditional music ensemble has become the most popular traditional music played by Balinese people for decades, both as leisure and religious activities. Musical activity can enhance cognitive function. However, there are limited activities for retired musicians.AimAlzheimer Indonesia Nederland Foundation (ALZI Ned) initiated the “Melody Memory Project” which aimed to increase the quality of life and dementia awareness of the retired Balinese elderly musician through gamelan practice.MethodsA weekly gamelan practice was conducted at the Pinda village community center, Gianyar, Bali Indonesia. Each session is preceded with dementia awareness session (e.g. sharing the 10 early signs of Alzheimer’s, brain gym) by ALZI Ned volunteers. There were health screenings once every two weeks (i.e. blood pressure/ blood sugar check, hearing problem). Cognitive assessment was conducted using Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) before and after 6 months.Thirty participants (age 58‐77 yo) were registered in this program. From July to October 2021, 6 practice sessions (each for 2 hrs), 2 performances and 3 health screening sessions were conducted in cooperation with the local government authorities. Due to Covid‐19 local lockdown, the program has been halted and will resume in February 2022. This activity has recently been approved as part of the village program and further continuity will be supported by the government. We expect to obtain more data by the time of the conference.

“Let me be dust”: Memory beyond testimony in Gwangju, South Korea

Archives of the 5·18 Gwangju People’s Uprising—a 1980 pro-democracy protest in South Korea—entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011. UNESCO’s inclusion provided international recognition for the Uprising after censorship under the Chun Doo-hwan regime; however, the narrative clarity presented through photographs, documents, and testimony in the museum now defines and limits memorialization. By contrast, Ch’oe Yun’s 1988 novella There a Petal Silently Falls imagines what lies beyond archives. With its silent protagonist and fragmented, sometimes illegible prose, Petal interrogates the coherence of memory when stripped of testimony. Reading Petal and the Archives as distinct memory sites, this article questions how memory projects privilege evidentiary archives, which might perpetuate the very patterns of violence such projects seek to uncover. As human rights ideologies become increasingly predominant, Ch’oe’s novella reasserts not only that the agony of memory can exceed the intelligibility of the archive, but that it must.

Combining Ground Penetrating Radar and Frequency Domain Electromagnetic Surveys to Characterize the Structure of the Calderone Glacieret (Gran Sasso d’Italia, Italy)

Ice is a rich reservoir of past climate information, and the well-documented increasing rate of glacier retreat represents a great loss for paleoclimate studies. In this framework, the Ice Memory project aims to extract and analyze ice cores from glacier regions worldwide and store them in Antarctica as a heritage record for future generations of scientists. Ice coring projects usually require a focused geophysical investigation, often based on Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) prospecting to assess the most suitable drilling positions. As a novel approach in the Calderone Glacieret, we integrated the GPR method with Frequency Domain Electromagnetic (FDEM) surveys, a technique not commonly applied in the glacial environment. We used a separated-coils FDEM instrument to characterize the glacieret structure. The acquired FDEM datasets were inverted and compared to the GPR data and borehole information. The results demonstrated the capability of the FDEM technique to define the structure of the glacieret correctly; therefore, the potential to be applied in frozen subsoil environments. This opens new perspectives for the use of the FDEM technique to characterize periglacial environments, such as rock glaciers, where the coarse-blocky surface hinders data acquisition and enhances the problem of signal scattering.

Remembering/forgetting hunger: towards an understanding of famine memorialisation

Although famines have historically claimed millions of lives, they are rarely publicly remembered through monuments, commemorative events or museums. This article investigates the apparent silence around famine memory by asking if there is something about famines that makes them less ‘commemorable’ than other mass-atrocities, and in which circumstances famines become the object of public memorialisation. Bringing together a rather fragmented literature on famine memory, the article outlines seven ways that famine memorialisation is impeded or made possible. First, it draws attention to the divisiveness of famines and their lack of clearly defined heroes and perpetrators. Second, shame and culpability shape how individuals and states talk – or keep quiet – about hunger victims. Third, earlier commemorative traditions and other traumatic events can inspire or crowd out famine memory. Fourth, for famines to be officially remembered, a break with the past tends to be necessary. The article also, fifth, discusses how famine memory can be used to construct national unity, or, sixth, instrumentalised in domestic and international politics. Finally, it highlights the role of activism and memory projects from below. While famines may not easily lend themselves to public commemoration, political contestation, nation-building or civil society initiatives can enable their memorialisation.

„kostbar ist uns nur der augenblick des erkennens“. Eine Einführung in Anne Seidels Chlebnikov weint (2015)

Summary Chlebnikov weint (2015), the first collection of poems by Anne Seidel (who was born in 1988 in Dresden), is more than a diary of her travels, be they real or imaginary, through the Russian territory and Russian culture and – more generally – the Slavic world. It causes images of today’s post-Soviet Eastern Europe to collide with images of the Stalinist or Nazi past through the use of figurative constellations which can be compared with Benjamin’s dialectic images. The collection is structured by the principle of differences and repetitions, of cycles and variations and of presence and absence whose dialectic creates what Anne Seidel calls “the instant of (re)cognition” after Mandelʹštam. That is why she defines every poem as a “form of absence”. That way, Anne Seidel keeps away from all memory projects which tend to crush the objects of poems under the weight of memorials.

Проект «Устная память Арктики» как аудиовизуальный ресурс по истории изучения и освоения Арктики

The research group of the Arctic Museum and Exhibition Center, Peter the Great Museum of An-thropology and Ethnography, in cooperation with the Marine Heritage Association and the media group of the Marine Technical College in St. Petersburg are implementing the Arctic Oral Memory project, supported by the Presidential Grants Fund. The project involves the creation of an open Internet resource https://arcticmemory.ru/ with video recordings of oral histories of famous Russian polar explorers. The article is devoted to the results and experience of the implementation of this project, which is at the intersection of journalism (popularization), cultural anthropology and history, providing the opportunity to see and hear first-hand information from those who personally participated in the study and development Arctic.

The Jewish secOnd generation art & family Museum Amsterdam

Abstract The Jewish secOnd generation art & family Museum Amsterdam (JOMA) opened in 2022. It combines the artwork of Maarten van der Heijden with the stories of his Jewish family. This article presents the various stages of van der Heijden's work and elucidates his practice as a second-generation artist, drawing on the notions of postmemory and sublimation. The article concludes by discussing the JOMA as a highly personal as well as a collective memory project and its role in human rights education.

Case study: Using the DiAGRAM tool for digital preservation

As part of the Safeguarding the Nation’s Digital Memory project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, project partners collaborated to produce a Bayesian network encapsulating digital preservation risks and the interactions between them. The integrated decision support system (IDSS) built around the Bayesian network was given the name DiAGRAM — a backronym for ‘Digital Archiving Graphical Risk Assessment Model’. In the words of the project mission, the IDSS allows archives ‘to investigate potential mitigations to digital preservation risks based on their own current circumstances, and communicate the relative effectiveness of different strategies (and the costs of different strategies) to relevant decision makers, funders and other stakeholders in an easy-tounderstand way. This will allow archives to evidence their requests for support based on a rigorous model which will have been developed using the experience of a wide range of institutions’. This case study examines how DiAGRAM can be used to achieve that objective.

GitHub as a collaborative curation platform for memory projects of COVID-19 in China

ABSTRACT This study looks at online collaborative memory projects on GitHub, all of which started amid China’s war on the then unknown corona virus in early 2020 and curated stories from Chinese language social media, news outlets, and official websites. It finds that GitHub enables a collaborative yet centralized archiving and curation workflow, and each of the three projects present unique ways the COVID-19 memories can be preserved. Three key events – the lockdown of Wuhan, the death of the whistleblowing doctor, and the controversy over Fang Fang’s diaries – are further analyzed to show how these memory projects could form narratives that post challenge to the officially sanctioned version of the ‘correct’ collective memory.