I manage most of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s social media outreach and I’d like to pitch a session to talk through the issues of commenting on different social media channels in order to think about how the Museum can serve its memorial and education functions effectively through different interfaces and different cultures of use.
For instance, Flickr’s comments (which appear below photos) and notes (which appear on top of photos) have raised some flags for us. There are plenty of good reasons to put the Museum’s photographs on Flickr or any other photo-sharing site (access, collective knowledge, etc.), but since the Museum is primarily responsible for safe-guarding the memory of Holocaust victims, is Flickr an okay place to do that? I’m interested here in the point that when we put photographs of the Holocaust on the web, we’re arguably putting artifacts out there. (Yes, these are “digital surrogates,” but not in content—the image is the same whether it’s printed on paper or composed out of bits.) If artifacts bear witness to the lives and suffering of people, can we put them on Flickr and let people mark them up with tags, and comments and notes, with the latter actually amounting to a defacement of the photo since it appears on the image? Can we put stuff on Flickr and turn off all the conduits for communication, even if it’s a violation of the culture of the space? If you have to turn off the commenting features in a social media space, is it better to opt out?
I’d also like to talk a little bit about how we can handle the comments we do get in more useful ways. First, I want to think about why we save all of them in these spaces. We don’t record idle chatter in gallery spaces (at least, not without appropriate signage), so why should we record it online? Is it appropriate to save everything people contribute to social media spaces? If not, then can we just delete all comments wholesale after a proclaimed period of time—90 days, or whatever? (I’m not huge on this, but I want to play devil’s advocate.) If it is appropriate, can we acknowledge the limitations of the interfaces and ask: should we archive comments after certain time periods and start fresh so people don’t have to scroll through 90 pages of commentary?
My point here is to think through preserving all of these comments and if we’re going to save them, how to make them useful. Can we create ways to sort and tag them so people looking for meaningful threads of dialogue or researchers or museum staff trying to track interactions can cut through the content in more efficient ways than scrolling? (Note: I think I’m proposing this a bit as a reaction against the way social media sites privilege “most recent” activity. While I think it’s important to be able to know what’s happening “right now,” or tomorrow, sometimes what I’m interested in happened 6 months or 6 years ago.)
I’d be curious to know from the more tech-savvy than I how feasible it would be to take comments from social media spaces and drop them into a digital archive that would allow searching and categorizing by platform, content, content type, etc. And I’m curious to know if people think this is worth doing. Thanks for reading.
Tags: archive, commenting, culture, memorial, preservation, proposal, user-generated content
What a fascinating and important topic! My initial thought is that photographs so often have memorial functions (a point that Walter Benjamin long ago made in the Work of Art essay, in which he pointed out that the ‘cult of the ancestors’ lingers on in portrait photographs.) As Miriam Hirsch and others note, this tendency is enormously pronounced at USMHM, especially in the Tower of Faces from the Yaffa Eliach Shtetl collection, but the memorial quality of facial images certainly pertains to digital photographs in cyberspace. To be sure, hard copy photographs with a visible history to them do presumably possess more of the Benjaminian ‘aura’ than do the purely digital face-images, but perhaps the circulating digital files possess a different *kind* of aura that we need to theorize. The transient and ephemeral quality of on line images may at times render them especially appropriate for on line memorial practice, but this needs to be thought through carefully; see the current debates within Facebook over Facebook on line memorial rites for the recently deceased.
Amelia raises the related question of documenting textual comments, and it is well worth remembering that written texts inspired by images of the dead do in themselves have powerful memorial functions. In the ancient world, written inscriptions on tomb stones were understood as direct messages to the dead and to the Other World, and even in the cyber-realm some of that potentiality endures, so respectfully and reverently archiving words inspired by the Dead is an important ethical responsibility.
I’ve recently taught Giorgio Agamben’s extraordinary book, “Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive” which raises difficult and important questions about the impossibility and necessity of witnessing in the age of what Foucault terms ‘biopower’; I’d love it if we could start at the unconference to think through the new forms of witnessing required with social and new media…
Thanks for your great comment, Mark. I had actually just reread Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s article about objects from the Holocaust being “testimonial objects” (http://poeticstoday.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/2/353) and it influenced this proposal.
I think your concluding piece about “new forms of witnessing” is really provocative here and is essential to this discussion. Makes me think about how much our rituals of mourning have changed in the advent of the Web and social media. I’d be curious to know if any of the participants are dealing with mourning on the Web…
Amelia –
You’re raising interesting questions regarding the value of certain kinds of user-contributed content. While I’m sure the default answer to any assessment of this kind of value is likely to be “it depends”, I would point out that the “value” of so many objects we treat as critical evidence or meaningful content was revealed only after much time and/or the right consumer was connected with that object.
From a technical perspective, it’s trivial to extract and archive something like blog post comments. However, it is seriously expensive in terms of time and money to add the kind of meta-value to these objects in the form of indexing and classification that provides the level of discoverability required to help it surface in useful ways in the future.
This is a great topic of conversation. I’m looking forward to participating.
I am very much interested in discussing text (digital or hand-written) as “testimonial object” and as a form of public discussion/conversation amongst non-copresent persons. This is something I have been working on for several years now in the context of contemporary memorial sites (physical and virtual, formal and informal) and now the USHMM in work with the pledges from FM2A. Comments, tags, pledges, tweets – these “mini-narratives” are all potential bits of a larger public history and knowledge base should they be archived. I think of StoryCorps and how there is a re-valuation of “casual” narrative/story-telling as more than just “stories.” They are testimonials to lives lived, feelings felt, events experienced, people transformed. The “mini-narratives” we can now craft with technology are really not so different – as Mark noted, they may simply be endowed with a different kind of aura where the technology to reproduce/disseminate widely does not diminish their value. I have been working through this as well, particularly through discussions with two colleagues who do work on virtual memorials (one on Facebook, the other on Second Life.) Hopefully I can bring some of that discussion to the table.
The challenge is, as mentioned previously, in organization of the data for useability. This is something that crosses over with Rebekah’s proposal in some ways as we do look to comments/pledges/open-ended query answers to frame how and in what ways we follow up with visitors to further assess actual individual and social effects in the world.
Hi,
One of my grad students is working extensively on mourning practices on line, including the nature of Facebook memorial pages (which are fairly static) as well as Facebook pages of dead persons in which friends continue, rather eerily, to post ‘what’s up’ messages until they gradually realize the person is deceased. Even those friends who know the person is dead often post on the person’s birthday. As in mortuary practice elsewhere, it is at times unclear if the bereaved are posting to other mourners or to the Dead. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and comparable non virtual memorial sites, one sometimes encounters confessional letters written directly to the Dead; I’m not sure if this ever happens on on line Facebook walls and so forth…
Hi Amelia, I would love to attend a session on this topic. One of the things we have been discussing at our social media committee meetings at the Tenement Museum is whether the comments folks leave on social media sites will turn out to be “self policing” the way people’s comments during our live museum tours turn out to be.
Also since our mission at the Tenement Museum is to promote tolerance, we have to “practice what we preach” and be tolerant towards all views – so what do we do when we encounter hate speech when engaged in social media? we are facing similar issues as you folks over at USHMM. Do we just disable commenting and avoid this issue all together?
This also reminds me that I have been thinking lately about how to talk to donors to our collection (in most cases descendants/ family members of the subjects in the photographs) about adding the images (in many cases their family photographs) to flickr etc. What role should their intentions have in deciding whether or not to add the content to social media sites? How can museum staff who have relationships with donors make them feel comfortable (or should we?) about their donated materials being used this way?
This is definitely an issue we have identified as a thorn in our side we want to pull out before putting our collections on social media sites.
I agreee that this is a fantastic topic. All of us in Museum technology-collections struggle with this. I call it our moral and ethical responsbility to both the collection and the public. I first encountered this years ago, when working at the Field Museum on a grant to put images of the 1893 Worlds Fair online (http://www.fieldmuseum.org/columbianexpo/highlights_historical_1.asp). You see that there is no place here for comments or interaction. But to today’s youth, this is static and therefore boring.
I’m totally inspired by Michael Edson and his team at the Smithsonian (why isn’t he coming to this conference??). I use his/their thoughts about this all the time (http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+–+Themes, http://usingdata.typepad.com/files/IMLS%20Webwise%202009_edson_v02.swf,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTJ8u2HGtrs).
I’m also thinking about the show Lost (I’m a big fan) and how much they have done with social media and online work in relation to their show. I think there is a lesson there for us in Museums.
I don’t think that everyone has access to the full article in Poetics, so I posted it to my slideshare account:
http://www.slideshare.net/JulieBrubaker/poetics-2623770
Please feel free to let others know. (I’ll take it down after the conference.)