Following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was created by the Vietnamese-backed government in an attempt to garner international legitimacy for the new regime. The museum, according to research fellow Timothy Williams at the Centre for Conflict Studies at Marburg University in Germany, seeks to shock visitors and demonstrate the horrific nature of the previous regime.

Very little at the museum has changed since it was first introduced after 1979. In 2014 came the biggest change in the museum’s tenure – an audio guide was introduced, bringing digital technology to the museum and changing the nature of visitors’ experiences while keeping the material of the exhibition unchanged.

The incremental technological advancement has given Williams and his team a chance to conduct a natural experiment at the museum, in an effort to answer the question: “How has the digital audio guide impacted visitors’ experiences of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum?”

He’ll present his findings on this subject in October at USC Shoah Foundation’s 2017 International Conference “Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies,” co-sponsored by the USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program. The two-day conference, which will be held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, invited scholars from across the globe to converge and discuss the relationship between digital methodologies, practices, ethics and the nature of contemporary Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

“With the digital revolution, the way we live together, the way we do research, the way we take action, the way we discuss the past and the way we remember is changing,” Williams said. “This opens up new challenges and opportunities to us as genocide scholars, and I believe we have put much too little thought into the implications of the digital revolution as a scholarly community and thus welcome the opportunity to exchange my thoughts with others on this issue.”

Williams’ background in peace and conflict studies gives him a unique perspective to share with conference attendees. Previously, he’s conducted research in Cambodia and was awarded the Emerging Scholar Prize of the international Association of Genocide Scholars in 2017, as well as the Raphael Lemkin Fellow of the American Genocide Memorial and Institute in 2015.

To fuel his research, Williams has been reviewing comments left by visitors on the travel recommendation website tripadvisor.com, specifically comparing comments left prior to and after the introduction of the audio guide. He’ll take a sample of the 7,924 reviews made on the page as of January 10, 2017, and study them using qualitative content analysis.

Williams says he looks forward to interacting with other researchers. He will be one of over a dozen scholars presenting on a variety of subjects, from the netnography of digital autobiographical documentary to the capacities of geographic information systems for analyzing Holocaust spaces to the usefulness of augmented reality technologies in sharing the memories of the places of genocides.

In an initial call for papers, USC Shoah Foundation asked academics to investigate the ways in which digital tools and methods, new media and information technologies can help us to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the Holocaust and Genocide Studies by raising new questions, improving our understandings, deepening our analyses, widening our fields of view and pioneering new approaches.

Williams’ research focuses on a digital approach to memorialization and uses digital sources. He hopes to get feedback on his results and use it to improve a piece he is writing for publication.