Holocaust Remembrance Day: COVID-19 changed how we remember
Holocaust memory in the shadow of pandemic; Hebrew University study analyzes how Corona has changed how we remember
2021-01-26
(Press-News.org) As the world prepares to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, communities and memorials around the world are addressing how to meaningfully commemorate the day while protecting public health and safety. The day marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is ordinarily commemorated with hundreds of individual memorial events across the globe. This year, most of those events will be impossible for any sizable gathering of people due to COVID-19.
With the goal of proposing relevant solutions to this challenge, Dr. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and research student Tom Divon of the Hebrew University Communication and Journalism Department, examine the many ways individual museums and memorial sites have adapted their programs over the past year.
As part of the research, Dr. Ebbrecht-Hartmann published in Media, Culture and Society a paper that revealed how educators have successfully leveraged new forms of Holocaust remembrance using social media tools. Included have been a series of memory related hashtags in use on Twitter and Facebook, "live" Instagram stories from memorial sites and concentration camps as well as Zoom discussions with Holocaust survivors across the globe. This transition was described by the author as particularly important because prior to Corona, many memorials objected to such means of communication out of fear that it would "commercialize" or even distort legitimate Holocaust memory.
"The onset of this global crisis has impacted our lives in many ways and indeed Holocaust remembrance is no exception," Dr. Ebbrecht-Hartman said. "While we have already been experiencing a transition where forms of social media and digital content have been increasingly recognized as legitimate expressions of commemoration, the severe restrictions of Corona both accelerated this process but also created a far more accepting culture for the role these media must play."
Ongoing research is compiling data and feedback from 32 Holocaust museums and monuments in nine different countries with the goal of better understanding which digital platforms have been used most effectively and were best received.
The research has so far indicated that educators and museum curators have strived to adapt content to be better absorbed via digital means and in so doing provided the motivation for relevant audiences to log on. Certain museums have opened Instagram and even TikTok accounts, produced online "digital challenges" while others have invested in virtual tours of their facilities. Most of these efforts represent a desire by Holocaust educators to make the history more relevant and accessible to the younger generations who are known to be less emotionally attached to the subject matter.
Among the initiatives described were Yad Vashem's broadcast of their annual commemoration via YouTube in addition to the traditional local television format. The museum also initiated a campaign where online users were invited to read the names of Holocaust victims and then upload them to social media accounts with relevant hashtags.
In a similar approach, the directors of the monument site at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria encouraged the public to upload and share pictures or drawings relating to the liberation of the camp with the hashtag #Liberation1945. The monument later released a video clip compiling the images that were uploaded.
Dr. Ebbrecht-Hartmann said, "Even while we are encouraged by these efforts, we know that the physical spaces where the Holocaust occurred will always remain sacred memorial sites. We anticipate that future commemoration will be a continuation of physical trips to these sites but the historic impact of Corona has introduced a new reality whereby digital memorials and online efforts can be an integral component of Holocaust remembrance."
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-01-26
ATLANTA - JANUARY 26, 2021 - A new study shows 4 in 10 cancer deaths are attributable to cigarette smoking in parts of the South region and Appalachia. For this study, appearing in Cancer Causes & Control, Farhad Islami, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the American Cancer Society examined the proportion of cancer deaths from 2013 to 2017 attributed to cigarette smoking in 152 metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas (MMSAs).
Data show the proportion of cancer deaths attributable to cigarette smoking was greater in men than in women in all evaluated MMSAs. In both sexes combined, the proportion of smoking-related cancer deaths ranged from 8.8% in Logan ...
2021-01-26
The battle to stop false news and online misinformation is not going to end any time soon, but a new finding from MIT scholars may help ease the problem.
In an experiment, the researchers discovered that fact-checking labels, when attached to online news headlines, actually work better after people read false headlines, compared to when they precede the headline or accompany it.
"We found that whether a false claim was corrected before people read it, while they read it, or after they read it influenced the effectiveness of the correction," says David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study's results.
Specifically, the researchers found, when "true" and "false" labels were shown immediately after participants in the experiment read headlines, ...
2021-01-26
A new neural network developed by researchers at the University of Eastern Finland and Kuopio University Hospital enables an easy and accurate assessment of sleep apnoea severity in patients with cerebrovascular disease. The assessment is automated and based on a simple nocturnal pulse oximetry, making it possible to easily screen for sleep apnoea in stroke units.
Up to 90% of patients experiencing a stroke have sleep apnoea, according to earlier studies conducted at Kuopio University Hospital. If left untreated, sleep apnoea can reduce the quality of life and rehabilitation of patients with stroke and increase ...
2021-01-26
An estimated 48 million cases of foodborne illness are contracted in the United States every year, causing about 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In some instances, the source is well known, such as a batch of tainted ground beef that infected 209 people with E. Coli in 2019. But 80 percent of food poisoning cases are of unknown origin, making it impossible to inform consumers of hazardous food items.
David Goldberg, assistant professor of management information systems at San Diego State University, wants to improve the traceability and ...
2021-01-26
Overview:
Phycocyanobilin (PCB) is a natural blue chromophore found in cyanobacteria. PCB is expected to be applied as food colorants and pharmaceuticals with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. PCB also functions as the chromophore of photoswitches that control biological functions in synthetic biology. PCB is covalently bound to phycocyanin, a component of photosynthetic antenna protein, and its extraction requires specialized expertise, time-consuming procedures, and/or expensive reagents. A research group led by Assistant Professor Yuu Hirose at Toyohashi University of Technology succeeded in developing a highly efficient and rapid extraction method for PCB by treating cyanobacterial cells with alcohol ...
2021-01-26
The use of online messaging and social media apps among Singapore residents has spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) study has found.
Three in four respondents (75%) said that their use of WhatsApp during the pandemic increased. This was followed by Telegram (60.3%), Facebook (60.2%) and Instagram (59.7%).
Accompanying this spike is videoconferencing fatigue, found the NTU Singapore study, which surveyed 1,606 Singapore residents from 17 to 31 December last year. Nearly one in two Singapore residents (44%) said they felt drained from videoconferencing activities, which ...
2021-01-26
Utilizing a newly developed state-of-the-art synchrotron technique, a group of scientists led by Dr. Ho-kwang Mao, Director of HPSTAR, conducted the first-ever high-pressure study of the electronic band and gap information of solid hydrogen up to 90 GPa. Their innovative high pressure inelastic X-ray scattering result serves as a test for direct measurement of the process of hydrogen metallization and opens a possibility to resolve the electronic dispersions of dense hydrogen. This work is published in the recent issue of Physical Review Letters.
The pressure-induced evolution of hydrogen's electronic band from a wide gap insulator to a closed gap metal, or metallic ...
2021-01-26
A group of KAIST researchers and collaborators have engineered a tiny brain implant that can be wirelessly recharged from outside the body to control brain circuits for long periods of time without battery replacement. The device is constructed of ultra-soft and bio-compliant polymers to help provide long-term compatibility with tissue. Geared with micrometer-sized LEDs (equivalent to the size of a grain of salt) mounted on ultrathin probes (the thickness of a human hair), it can wirelessly manipulate target neurons in the deep brain using light.
This study, led by Professor Jae-Woong Jeong, is a step forward from the wireless head-mounted ...
2021-01-26
The prevalence of inflammatory bowel diseases has significantly increased both in Finland and globally. These disorders cannot be entirely cured. Instead, they are treated with anti-inflammatory drugs and, at times, through surgery.
If conventional drug therapies based on anti-inflammatory drugs are ineffective, the diseases can be treated using infliximab, a biological TNF-α blocker that is administered intravenously. Infliximab is an antibody that prevents TNF-α, a pro-inflammatory factor, from binding with inflammatory cells in the intestine. It is effective in reducing inflammation and improving the patient's condition, while also controlling the disease well.
Although infliximab therapy is often effective, roughly 30-40% of patients either do not respond ...
2021-01-26
An international research team succeeded in gaining new insights into the artificially produced superheavy element flerovium, element 114, at the accelerator facilities of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany. Under the leadership of Lund University in Sweden and with significant participation of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) as well as the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) in Germany and other partners, flerovium was produced and investigated to determine whether it has a closed proton shell. The results suggest that, contrary to expectations, flerovium is not a so-called "magic nucleus". The results were published in ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Holocaust Remembrance Day: COVID-19 changed how we remember
Holocaust memory in the shadow of pandemic; Hebrew University study analyzes how Corona has changed how we remember
