Death camp heritage ‘from below’? Instagram and the (re)mediation of Holocaust heritage

Virtual reality as a spatial prompt in geography learning and teaching

“…That workshop centred on the practices and politics of memorialisation in places associated with death, genocide, trauma, and other violent histories. In the workshop, we incorporated VR field trips to the UNESCO World Heritage‐listed ABSM in Oświęcim, Poland, a case study that was also discussed in the lecture section of the workshop and that is the subject of a burgeoning literature focused on digital education and remembrance (see Carter‐White, 2018; Commane & Potton, 2019; Manca, 2021).…”

“…Although the site’s selection was partly a pragmatic consequence of the workshop’s focus on sites of difficult heritage, we also considered that its traumatic history constitutes an appropriate context in which to explore VR’s pedagogical potential. Sites of difficult heritage have become common destinations in undergraduate geography field trips because of their capacity to raise complex moral and political questions (Maddrell & Wigley, 2019), but the value of such visits is predicated on the presumed importance of being there , physically present at sites whose materialities testify to a heinous past (Carter‐White, 2018). Crucially then, our selection of the ABSM renders untenable any possibility of considering “virtual” travel to be equivalent to, and thus potentially a replacement for, “real” travel.…”

Identifying hidden semantic structures in Instagram data: a topic modelling comparison

“…While Instagram encourages consumers to engage with memorial sites and historical events (Commane and Potton, 2019), earlier research mainly features a top-down method by first identifying a specific attraction as the study context or assessing dark experiences based on predefined measurements (Light, 2017). Seeing that Instagram has caused the democratisation of heritage, the image and understanding of dark tourism can be re-contextualised by analysing Instagram posts (Carter-White, 2018) based on travellers’ experiences towards tragic events and/or sites. Methodologically speaking, dark tourism remains as a niche market, allowing researchers to analyse almost the whole population and look at the phenomenon from a holistic perspective.…”

“…Increasingly, the commodification of death and people’s awareness of dark sites (Martini and Buda, 2020) has opened a new scientific paradigm for dark tourism. Particularly, Instagram functions as a new lens for tourists to exchange dark experiences (Carter-White, 2018) and adds value to dark tourism management (Commane and Potton, 2019). While Instagram encourages consumers to engage with memorial sites and historical events (Commane and Potton, 2019), earlier research mainly features a top-down method by first identifying a specific attraction as the study context or assessing dark experiences based on predefined measurements (Light, 2017).…”

An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites

“…The most widespread concept is remediation , used to characterize the digital memory of diverse objects, such as the Soviet past (Kaprāns, 2016; Kozachenko, 2019), the Finnish civil war (Heimo, 2014), the siege of Sarajevo (Knudsen, 2016), the transatlantic slave trade (Morgan & Pallascio, 2015), the Kambodian genocide (Benzaquen, 2014); World War II (Makhortykh, 2020), and Tibetan self-immolations (Warner, 2014). The remediation of traumatic experience and its heritage—notably, the memory of the Holocaust on Youtube—has not only positive aspects (Gibson & Jones, 2012; Kansteiner, 2017; Makhortykh, 2019), but also implies contestation (Carter-White, 2018; Manca, 2021). Related frequently occurring concepts to remediation , drawing from on the work on andrew hoskins , are media memory and connective memory (Birkner & Donk, 2020; Carter-White, 2018; de Smale, 2020; Mahmutović & Baraković, 2021; Makhortykh, 2019, 2020; Rutten et al, 2013).…”