Preliminary Programme

In July 2014, The Guardian website published a 360-degree virtual tour of Nyamata Church in Rwanda to mark the 20th anniversary of the country’s genocide. Users engage in an interactive experience, viewing photographs of the church at all angles. The church is a national memorial of the genocide, where the bones of those killed now lie on display. Instead of burying the remains, these have been left in the open. Visitors can look into very heart of genocide: the extensive piles of bones that represent the c.1million Tutsi and Hutu sympathizers slaughtered in the killings are exhibited in the crypt.

Can the virtual take the place of a visit to the physical site? In assessing this, the paper analyses the 360-degree tour in relation to two criteria, where these map onto the intentions of the photojournalist who created this tour – the acclaimed Martin Edström. These two criteria are: experiencing death and education. It is concluded that the tour does much to replicate being physically present at the memorial, although there are major gaps between the virtual and the real. This is demonstrated by a comparative analysis of the tour with in-person accounts of visitation. The paper also examines how far the virtual can educate. It demonstrates that, while the virtual experience inflicts some heavy restrictions on understanding comparative to visiting the location in person, this also makes a major educational contribution. In fact, it has educational benefits that go beyond what physical visitation can offer. (Show less)

Professor Bermudez will present findings from her research on how history education fosters or hinders a critical understanding of political violence. She will focus on an analysis of history education resources from Spain, Colombia and the U.S. regarding nine different episodes of their violent past. A comparative analysis identified ten “narrative keys” that describe how historical narratives represent political violence, and whether they normalize violence or foster a critical perspective on it. These narrative keys afford useful criteria to examine if the accounts of the past conveyed through digital tools favor or not a critical understanding of the violent past. (Show less)

This paper will explore the use of mobile applications to interpret historical landscapes for which there are few material artefacts or markers remaining to aid interpretation. It takes as its case study the ‘Walking with Romans’ application, developed by the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority in Wales, UK. The application enables visitors to navigate a Roman marching camp and fortlet and exists to encourage visitation to a lesser visited part of the Brecon Beacons National Park, through the development of a resource that enables visitors to navigate the remote site using their mobile phone or tablet. ‘Walking with Romans’ combines visual, audio and interactive interpretations of the Roman occupation of the landscape explored. This paper draws upon a research project that investigated the experiences of visitors to the site who were using the app in pairs or as family groups, using both innovative video analysis and conversation analysis to explore user experiences. Using on-body cameras provided insights into visitor experiences of the site, while limiting intrusion on that experience. The study revealed that although the use of the application enhanced the visitor experience, enabling users to visualise the Roman site, interactions with the application were not unproblematic. Through visitor’s conversations with each other and within follow up interviews participants drew attention to the representations of different identities within the application narrative. This issue will be discussed within this paper, extrapolating examples from the dataset, revealing that the process of constructing narratives for heritage landscapes, particularly those that might be sites of dissonant heritage is a process that requires the involvement of multiple stakeholders, if the needs of non-homogenous visitor groups are to be met.

References:
Tunbridge, J.E. and Ashworth, G.J., 1996. Dissonant heritage: the management of the past as a resource in conflict. John Wiley & Sons. (Show less)

This paper examines how digital history and digitized archives might facilitate truth and reconciliation processes in the United States, particularly in regards to the history and legacies of American slavery. It examines the origins and evolution of the Georgetown Slavery Archive, part of the University’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, and situates it in the broader context of truth and reconciliation commissions.

The opening of institutional and often secret archives is a cathartic and essential part of truth and reconciliation. From the East German Stasi files to the archives of military regimes in South America, public inspection of once-secret files documenting surveillance, torture, and disappearances has helped victims, survivors, and citizens bring recognition to injustices committed by individuals and institutions. While truth and reconciliation commissions often originate as states emerge from sectarian conflicts, they recently have included introspections into institutional injustices occurring outside the parameters of war. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which undertook a comprehensive examination of the abuses of Indigenous people in the Indian residential school system, is a prime example.
Despite 250 years of slaveholding in North America and over 150 years since the end of American slavery, the United States has never undertaken a comprehensive examination of slavery. The evidence of American slavery is visible in every state east of the Mississippi River in land use patterns, buildings (including the White House), and persistent racial inequality. Yet the documentary history of American slavery often remains inaccessible, housed in archives inaccessible, unwelcoming, or intimidating to non-academics. While slavery is the original sin of the United States, there has been little official atonement or institutional introspection.
It is, then, significant that several American universities have begun to examine, understand, and in some cases, atone for their historical benefit from slavery. Georgetown University’s relationship with slavery and the sale of 272 slaves owned by the Maryland Province of Jesuits that saved the financially-imperiled college in 1838 has received much attention in recent years. In 2015, University president John DeGioia formed a Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to revisit the University’s slaveholding past and make recommendations for remembrance and contrition.
An important part of the university’s work on slavery, memory, and reconciliation has been the creation of the Georgetown Slavery Archive (SlaveryArchive.Georgetown.edu), a digital repository of documents related to the 1838 sale and slaveholding by Maryland Province Jesuits generally. The Slavery Archive came online in April 2016 and has met with positive reception from historians, students, journalists, and most importantly, the descendants themselves, who have found answers to old questions about ancestral roots. For other universities and potentially for larger entities, the Slavery Archive offers a path forward for addressing the history and legacy of American slavery by opening the archives to the light of digitization, transcription, and annotation. It represents a democratization of access to the paper trails that reveal family trees, the roots of American capitalism, and inseparable interconnectedness of American history and American slavery. (Show less)

This paper seeks to offer insight into visitor engagement with digital depictions of recent war history within museum spaces. Using research conducted at a variety of case study sites, we argue that digital technologies in museums and memorials are increasingly important for the affective intensities they make possible, and that these are in turn important in promulgating historical narratives and consolidating pedagogical aims in such sites. We also discuss the use of ‘sensory ethnography’ (Pink 2015) as a methodology to understand how people perceive and make sense of such sites.

Building on the notion of ‘digital materialities’, we consider the opportunities and challenges of screen-based digital technologies for enrolling visitors in historical narratives. Beyond generating atmospheric environments, such methods of sensorial interaction can function as innovative ways to communicate public understanding of significant past events. Yet because they rely fundamentally upon an intricate fusion of individual memory and historical representation, their affective impact inevitably exceeds the narratives they represent. The ways in which visitors are responding to these digital encounters - and how they can enable complex ways of imagining and feeling the past - forms the basis for this paper.

S. Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. (London, Sage, 2015). (Show less)