Holocaust Memory in the Digital Ageexplores the nexus of new media and memory practices, raising questions about how advances in digital technologies continue to influence the nature of Holocaust memorialization. Through an in-depth study of the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, Jeffrey Shandler weighs the possibilities and challenges brought about by digital forms of public memory.
The Visual History Archive's holdings are extensiveover 100,000 hours of video, including interviews with over 50,000 individualsand came about at a time of heightened anxiety about the imminent passing of the generation of Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses. Now, the Shoah Foundation's investment in new digital media is instrumental to its commitment to remembering the Holocaust both as a subject of historical importance in its own right and as a paradigmatic moral exhortation against intolerance. Shandler not only considers the Archive as a whole, but also looks closely at individual survivors' stories, focusing on narrative, language, and spectacle to understand how Holocaust remembrance is mediated.
Introduction:
chapter abstract
Videotaping interviews of Holocaust survivors began in the 1970s, at a strategic convergence of developments in technology (the widespread availability of videotaping and viewing equipment) and Holocaust remembrance, which had recently become a prominent fixture of public culture in the Western world. The Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (VHA), inaugurated in 1994, the largest and most available collection of theslƒ
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