Tim Cole

TopoTiles: Storytelling in Care Homes with Topographic Tangibles

In this paper we present our initial ethnographic work from developing TopoTiles, Tangible User Interfaces designed to aid storytelling, reminiscence and community building in care homes. Our fieldwork has raised a number of questions which we discuss in this paper including: How can landscape tangibles be used as proxy objects, standing in for landscape and objects unavailable to the storyteller? How can tangible interfaces be used in an indirect or peripheral manner to aid storytelling? Can miniature landscapes aid recollection and story telling through embodied interaction? Are ambiguous depictions conducive to storytelling? Can topographic tangibles encourage inclusivity in group sharing situations? In this paper we share our initial findings to these questions and show how they will inform further TopoTiles design work.

Military presences, civilian absences: Battling nature at the Sennybridge Training Area, 19402008

Abstract This article draws upon environmental history perspectives to reframe the relationship between the military and technology. It assesses military claims dubbed by Woodward (2001) khaki conservation that military land use has prevented the more environmentally damaging practices of intensive agriculture with its use of technologies of fertilizers and pesticides, through a case study of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) Sennybridge Training Area (SENTA) in upland Wales. Here military environmentalism has told a very different story from that articulated by displaced civilians. The article teases out the discourses of military environmentalism presented by the MoD, but also moves beyond these publicly articulated statements to consider the story told in private and seeks to assess the validity of military claims. The complex nature of land use at SENTA points to the military despite its rhetoric continuing its own battle against nature deemed out of place.

Holocaust Tourism: The Strange yet Familiar/the Familiar yet Strange

On 31 August 1940, Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, received a telephone call from the SS, requesting that he make provision for ‘some tourists’ to visit the synagogue. It was an unusual enough request to make it into the pages of his diary, although after the creation and closing of the ghetto, it seems that the trail of German tourists continued. On 30 April 1941, Czerniakow met with members of the SS and ‘tourists’ from the Wehrmacht, who he ‘briefed … about the Community’. Later a fellow council member led the group on a ‘guided tour’ of the ghetto (Hilberg et al., 1979: 192, 227). Three-quarters of a century after Czerniakow received ‘tourists’ to the synagogue and ghetto, contemporary western tourists to Warsaw are still directed to these places. For guide books such as the Rough Guide to Poland, the Nozyk Synagogue — ‘the only one of the ghetto’s three synagogues still standing’ — should be the ‘first stop on any itinerary of Jewish Warsaw’ (Bousfield and Salter, 2005: 106). Twenty-first century visitors to Warsaw are also encouraged to visit the array of monuments erected on the site of the former ghetto as well as the surviving fragments of the ghetto wall (Bousfield and Salter, 2005: 107–9). The guide Let’s Go Eastern Europe offers its clientele of largely American student backpackers a ‘Warsaw Ghetto Walking Tour’ (Let’s Go, 2005: 522).

Review Article: Scales of Memory, Layers of Memory: Recent Works on Memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust

John Dower, Embracing Defeat. Japan in the Aftermath of World War II, London, Allen Lane, 1999; pp. 676; ISBN 0 713 99372 3 Hyman A. Enzer and Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer (eds), Anne Frank. Reflections on her Life and Legacy, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2000; pp. xvii + 285; ISBN 0 252 06823 8 Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces. Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000; pp. xvi + 352; ISBN 0 52

‘Marvellous Raisins in a Badly-Cooked Cake’: British Reactions to the Screening of Holocaust

This most British of analogies, ‘marvellous raisins in a badly-cooked cake’, came at the end of a mixed review of Holocaust by The Listener’s TV critic Joseph Hone when the four-part minis er ie s was screened on BBC1 in September 1978.1 First shown on American television in April 1978, Holocaust told the story of the fictional German-Jewish Weiss family alongside that of an unemployed lawyer, Erik Dorf, who embarks on a career within the SS. The members of the Weiss and Dorf families are followed through a variety of Holocaust landscapes and the duration of the Nazi regime, with the story of the European-wide murder of Jews told through the Weiss family members’ varied experiences. Such a telling was, Hone concluded, not entirely successful. He was far from alone in criticising Holocaust, even if the analogy he drew was somewhat eccentric. Indeed, his criticisms were relatively restrained compared to those of two colleagues at The Listener. The week before, David Wheeler had dubbed Holocaust ‘history for idiots’.2 The week after, it was dismissed by Jack Duncan as ‘the daftest show I have ever seen on television’.3

Writing ‘Bystanders’ into Holocaust History in More Active Ways: ‘Non-Jewish’ Engagement with Ghettoisation, Hungary 1944

Drawing upon case studies of the implementation of ghettoisation in the Hungarian cities of Budapest and Szeged, this article calls for renewed attention to be paid to Holocaust ‘bystanders’. In both cities, significant numbers of ‘non-Jews’ responded to measures that they saw directly affecting themselves, and had some influence upon the final shape of ghettoisation. In short, ‘bystanders’ in these cities were active agents, whose role needs to be written into Holocaust history. However, such rewriting does well to jettison the traditional terminology of ‘bystander’, with its connotations of inaction and indifference, which fails to do justice to the variety of active responses by ‘non-Jewish’ neighbours.

Following The Rough Guide to Góra Kalwaria: Constructing Memory Tourism of Absence in Post-Communist Poland

This article uses comparative analysis of the editions of The Rough Guide to Poland published in the 1990s to argue that a memory tourism of absence was being offered to western visitors. This differed from existing categories of tourism — dark tourism, Holocaust tourism, Jewish heritage tourism — by directing visitors to see the places where Jews lived before the Holocaust, and where their memory was in danger of being erased in both the communist and post-communist era. In this context, western visitors were not only directed to sites to witness absence, but also to engage in acts of memory tourism that were charged with a sense of moral purpose. A concern with absence was more widely shared in the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and this memory tourism of absence is one that — like all acts of tourism — can and needs to be historicized.

Holocaust archaeologies: approaches and future directions

those selected, by and large Nazi genocidal aims against the Hungarian Jews were not completely hindered. According to Buggeln, camp research has not systematically progressed beyond groundbreaking work carried out around and since the millennium by Orth and others. While he acknowledges the important contributions made by magisterial encyclopedic works, such as Ort des Terrors or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, he makes a significant effort to synthesize the results and to assess the complex as a whole.

Becoming My Mother's Daughter:. A Story of Survival and Renewal, and: A Hero's Many Faces: Raoul Wallenberg in Contemporary Monuments (review)

83 a remarkably inelastic marker of identity” (64) such that “Jewish endogamy... [was] mandated by distinctly American sociological facts” (69). Yet these sociological facts shifted over the following decades, and by the Cold War, opportunities for intermarriage multiplied. Moreover, empirical evidence, such as the conversions of Marilyn Monroe and Sammy Davis, Jr., rendered sociological definitions of Jewishness inflexible and unusable. When forced to explain how Jews could marry non-Jews and retain their identity as Jews and how non-Jews could elect to become Jews, Jewish leaders turned to what Berman calls “a new vocabulary of...volitional Jewishness” (145). The collapse of the sociological bulwark against intermarriage generated a new, albeit uneasy, language of choice as Jewish leaders sought to guarantee Jewish survival by guiding Jews, half-Jews, and even non-Jews to select difference, to embrace Jewishness. Unwilling to completely relinquish sociology, however, they bolstered their arguments to choose Jewishness with surveys and data rather than theology or spirituality. To establish the contours and life-cycles of these dueling vocabularies of Jewishness, Speaking of Jews wisely focuses on the leaders who constructed and circulated them. Yet if Jewishness is “an ideology about the relationship between Jews and non-Jews” (145), Berman’s book signals the need to address the nature and consequences of this interplay: what did non-Jews think of the public language Jewish leaders used? How did the conversations and interactions between Jews and non-Jews change as the language of Jewishness evolved? To what degree did ordinary practicing and non-practicing Jews accept the terms of sociological and/or volitional Jewishness? Did they believe the vocabularies accurately described their lives and identities as American Jews? That sociological Jewishness continues to compete with volitional Jewishness today points to the fertile questions raised by Berman’s work.