well greetings everyone from here in London and many thanks indeed to associate professor Tams and Peach for the invitation to speak with you today and also to Dr Michael Falk for all of his assistance with the various Technical and administrative aspects behind this session and so to business in a January Edition there we go of London's evening Standard newspaper young Joe Bromley had a confession to make beneath the headline I used chat GPT to research my dissertation here's why it's fine Joe detailed and Justified his recent interface with the most prominent of the new AI
language Bots to help him with this thesis on fashion journalism while Keen to point out that he had not used chat GPT to compose any raw text Joe did note that the bot provided a much more efficient tool than Google or Wikipedia for the purposes of drawing up items for a literature review called me lazy he stated but it helped me produce an initial list of books and academics for my research I still read the damn text but that short conversation with chat GPT saved me hours of trawling through Wikipedia now Joe is not so
different from those among my undergraduates or the school age offspring of my colleagues using chat GPT to assist with their history essays why not save time and energy a Reason by dipping into the collective mind of AI to help them uh have at best a steer or for us as Educators at worst a lead author memory for these students mostly equates to data hence prompting the synapses of the bot seems akin to learning from an omniscient Master historian as critics have been quick to point out chat GPT has its evident shortcomings written text can be
formulaic albeit eminently possible and even sometimes commendable the data set stops at 2021 and perhaps most concerningly chat GPT Falls foul of the same issues pertaining to earlier aggregated data sets namely a skew towards particular National knowledge economies especially those in the west as illustrated by this somewhat grainy slide the last of these issues will doubtless be familiar to the Wikipedia experts among us today just as also held true in a still more refined way for those used to reading hard copy encyclopedias in an era before the internet so in this short lecture I want
to move somewhat away from the world of bits and Bots to offer instead a longer perspective on the concept of collective memory a term that needs some unpacking I will go on to chart the interface between historians and the field of memory studies and to explore a contemporary and real-world example of collective memory in action here in London looking Beyond and before the digital realm is the default domain for comprehending the construction of social meaning I shall instead examine how group understandings of the past have long been Advanced and edited by historians from this a
conceptual apparatus has emerged for tackling the ruptures and harmonies entailed by reflecting collectively moving between the analog and digital worlds I shall aim to lay the ground for further discussion on how Collective memory can best be understood so when we use the word memory today we are likely to be referring not to an art or to a practice as was the norm in the early modern period but instead as mentioned already to storage capacity the world of terabytes and server Farms is the world many people might think of upon hearing the word the word memory
sometimes they also might think perhaps of mental capacity but memory has a deeper history one which it one which historians have excavated and explored and from which some vital through lines can be traced it's modern Roots lie in the late 19th century we might turn here to the 1890s writings of French philosopher Ori bergson for instance a scholar who sought to differentiate between unconscious forms of memory so-called motor mechanisms and its conscious forms deliberative Recollections of a moment in the past such interest in the experience of memory in the present strongly influenced both literary and
psychological approaches to the topic in the 20th century the novelist Marcel proust in his celebrated multi-volume novel In Search of Lost Time explored the ways in which memories could be involuntarily and powerfully prompted for example and most famously when his narrator tastes a piece of Madeleine cake he has dipped in his tea and feels a wave of I quote delicious pleasure which he only much later realizes was because the taste reminded him of Sunday morning childhoods with his aunt when he enjoyed such refreshments the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud centered on the cyclic handling of
such memories memories but for Freud were often traumatic those are the ones that most interest him and those traumatic memories he argued were repressed in the unconscious mind and needed to somehow be coaxed back into Consciousness to decode and dissolve their painful meanings these pioneering Scholars of memory were concerned principally with individuals and they're concerted or unconscious reflections not until the second quarter of the 20th century did attention focus on Collective memory and this in turn is associated above all with the French sociologist Maurice orwax a student of bergson who was also influenced by French
sociologist Emile durkheim albrex's Central Insight was that all individual remembering always takes place in a social context using the linguistic and symbolic resources of that environment even when we remember alone he argued almost a century ago now we can only communicate our memories using language language that is inherently social in nature in this schema human inner life was socially determined and contextual understanding was hence crucial his most famous study of the inscription of collective memory in the urban landscape focused on the city of Jerusalem a setting where the historical perspectives of successive waves of inhabitants
and Invaders were inscribed into the local topography each of these waves sponsors a different Collective memory for All Blacks there are as many different Collective memories as groups within Society it is individuals within those groups who spur the reflections but in so doing they draw on context hence making Collective memories socially constructed moreover all Collective memories are influenced by the present as well as by the past and so generational Factor factors and the punctuation of successive historical events accordingly have a strong influence shaped by All Blacks the final two decades of the 20th century witnessed
a memory boom as Scholars across a range of disciplines discovered the subject and those with exclusively English language skills picked up all blacks's newly translated text many Publications on Collective memory hence followed a generation after the end of the second world war there was by the 1980s a Readiness to confront the horrors of that conflict including and perhaps especially the Holocaust after 1989 further impetus was added when the collapse of communist regimes brought to the four numerous tensions and strands of memory that had been frozen to Boo or otherwise inaccessible for decades in the west
dominance assumptions about whose histories should be taught and commemorated were by now being questioned related in part to activism and also to postmodernism which posed a philosophical challenge to the authority of traditional history changing technology too played a role as Jay Winter notes advances in digital data storage and transmission with the Advent of the personal computer and email allowed witnessing to expand both in reach and in range of content by this time it was well established following Alessandro portelli's work on oral history but memory was best approached and I quote not as a passive depository
of facts but as an active process of creation of meanings it works differently at different points in the life cycle Alastair Thompson adds and from neurobiology we know that memories are distributed across the brain engaging multiple portions of gray matter Each of which deals with different aspects and tasks of remembering the turn to memory was accompanied by a turn towards place as an object of study something that all blacks had anticipated and in this regard the huge French collaborative project led by Pierre Nora on Leo de Memoir or sites of memory was extremely influential Nora's
work elucidated the distinction he drew between real Community memory milia de Memoir which he believed had died out in France around the 1970s and the didactic expression of national memory through year or sites of memory for Nora these were vestigial crystallizations of memory in time and place and aside from statues which were an obvious source of Interest objects like books could also fit in within this delineation of sites of memory framework that could also readily be stretched to incorporate more recent Innovations like Wikipedia by now the field of memory studies had been born with journals
professional societies conferences and an avalanche of Publications soon following drawing heavily from philosophy and from literary cultural and psychoanalytic theory as well as from sociology anthropology geography and other disciplines this is a capacious Arena indeed there is now an immense supporting literature as well as several useful books that offer a broad survey for the commencing pilgrim a thriving subfield of cultural memory has emerged devoted to exploring the ways in which cultural heritage is recorded transmitted enacted and lodged in human consciousness Elida asthma is worth Consulting here she developed this focus on transmission drawing a useful
and influential distinction between those aspects of the past that we actively remember such as by choosing to display them in a museum the so-called Canon of cultural memory as she puts it and those forgotten but not lost traces of the past which we store for possible access in the future the so-called archive now memories twin inescapably is forgetting and this Scholars have argued could be Collective too all recur who contrasts in particular the dangers of what he calls Escapist forgetting such as the tendency by The Victors of History to forget the history of its victims
with the value of forgetting in the context of forgiveness such forgiveness should not erase the traces and records of the past he argues and one wouldn't need to think too long to ponder examples of both types of collective forgetting contrasting the treatment recorded episodes such as the Armenian Genocide by the descendants of its perpetrators with the efforts of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to Bear witness and then to move on from the horrors of Apartheid a psychological emphasis also remains within the field of memory studies stretching back to Freud hence Marianne Hirsch's influential concept
of post-memory was conceived to capture the sense of many children the police Apollo course survivors that their lives had been haunted by complex inherited memories that they only partially understood it has though this concept of post memory that is being widely applied in other contexts to explore the transmission of the past and particularly of traumatic or concealed pasts to subsequent Generations on the other hand the fast developing Sciences of memory may soon lead us into a new era in which pharmacological treatments will be available to enable so-called therapeutic forgetting concurrently within memory studies as a
whole a great deal of literature and Conference attention remains focused on themes of trauma perhaps not a surprising outcome of working through the horrors of the 20th and early 21st centuries but a focus which nonetheless often misses memories sponsored by more consensual practices many of them Collective and all of them also relational more recently again Scholars across multiple fields are now engaged in understanding how the digital realm shapes individual and Collective memory from the nostalgic reminiscences uh hosted on sites engaging with an urban past uh his is lost Melbourne for example which shares photographs of
the city as it used to be um so so there's that domain to the digital renderings of past worlds explored by Gamers through their consoles through these worlds and these engagements Scholars have been hard at work to track meanings sometimes drawing on Marita sturkins notion that so-called Technologies of memory are increasingly influential in mediating memory through an array of channels and this conference is pioneering I think in its attempts to unpick how Wikipedia interfaces and fuses with knowledge of the past as part of all of this and you won't be surprised to hear me Champion
the vital place within this of historians as trained specialists in the interpretation of the past in guiding and enriching these interpretive processes and here I think the public historian Alex Green's attention on the historian's toolkit is useful that toolkit contains practice skills in analyzing social relations understandings of patternings of time the ability to weave and map context and to evaluate and integrate evidence and also to persuade audiences all of this can also prove extremely valuable here so we need then a rich understanding of the long vectors of memory in shaping the domains of public engagement
and also of the real world public landscapes in which memory so often unfolds and it is to an applied example of this that I now turn in order to round out my analysis as the scholar Edward Casey contends and All Blacks concurs memory is inherently spatial we must therefore ground our understanding of memory in both the textured 3D World of experience which we inhabit day-to-day and in the digital world with which it is ever increasingly implicated as an illustration of this let me turn now to the covid memorial wall alongside the Thames here in London
this unofficial Memorial is composed of tens of thousands of individual Hearts bearing the names of loved ones lost to the disease cited opposite the houses of Parliament since March 2021 as a reminder to politicians blamed by many surviving family members for policies that exacerbated the severity of the pandemic the wall serves as an effective reminder of both the individual tragedy of lost loves and the collective scale of death and in the absence of a state-sanctioned official Memorial the covid War Memorial feels a kind of bottom-up need offering families a chance to gather and to ritualize
the loss and to see their pain honored in public what we might call Memorial accessorizing and seeing here features through the addition of printed photos and personal messages around the sign as seen in the top left image and pausing to ponder individual Hearts can prove an affecting experience such as in this instance on the lower left with the example of Maureen Morton Nana photographed and identified as a fan of Liverpool Football Club You'll Never Walk Alone this then is a people's Memorial falling outside and indeed in some ways and in several ways antithetical to state
power and the memorial lives in multiple spaces it physically adorns the walls flanking the Thames where loved ones come to Mark in ink the names of the Lost unpainted red hearts and to view names already written by kith and kin politicians in the general public also frequent this space and the moon and the memorial is visually striking even from a distance a crimson ribbon some half a kilometer in length a small army of volunteers also tends the memorial reinscribing names and repainting red hearts the memorial lives digitally as well and here for example is a
screenshot of the Wikipedia entry uh for the site which has been recently added to as of course is one of the benefits of the format and here interestingly is a is a screenshot of the digitized version of this space to to sponsor further forms of collective memory and using the link on screen National covered memorialwall.org you can scroll the entire length of the memorial and at various intervals listen to oral history testimonies of loved ones reflecting on loss and what the memorial means to them and the digital version of the covid Memorial Wall speaks to
that loss it also speaks to presence and to potential future Erasure for this we must be reminded is an unofficial or in memory studies terms a vernacular Memorial National in ambition but not in terms of permission so far Westminster Council have not brought pressure washers to what could uncharitably be viewed as graffiti but the memorial is vulnerable to such defacement as well as fading over time the idea of collective memories as palimpsestic or layered is also underscored by the presence within the covid Memorial Wall of an older Memorial Park this to recall those lost to
the neurodegenerative disorder boyzfeld Jacob disease so-called mad cow disease in the 1980s and we remember here all blacks's contention that our concerned to remember collectively is forever informed by presentist concerns Collective remembering whether in the physical landscape or in a virtual domain is always also tied to power the covid memorial wall and to an extent Wikipedia may be examples exhibiting more democratic potential than is often the norm but we must remember that the past is most often used to naturalize and to justify the existing social order it has also played a very important role in
providing inspiration identity and focus to movements challenging that status quo in the name of women the poor and religious ethnic or sexual minorities among others in today's fragmented and fast-changing digital and media landscape the presence of the past and its use and contestation is more dispersed and diverse than ever trained historians with questioning mindsets must therefore be agile in surveying and understanding this ever-changing scene for the importance of historical expertise and sophisticated analytical skills in our public debate about the past seems if anything to be greater than ever so thanks then for your attention today
feel very free to find me via the usual channels and here in closing is a quick plug for my co-edited textbook for teaching undergraduate and graduate students history memory and public life I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference and thanks again all the best
