In this presentation, Elyse Semerdjian will outline the earliest Armenian pilgrimages to the killing fields of Dayr al-Zur in the Syrian Desert. It is there that Armenians interacted with the remains of Armenians murdered during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1918) in acts of remembrance. Semerdjian will discuss the origins of the now-destroyed Armenian Genocide Memorial in Dayr al-Zur and the ritual and collection habits of pilgrims that enact what she calls bone memory.

Modern methods of analyzing thousands of Holocaust survivor testimonies contained in collections such as the Visual History Archive present a challenge that is at once ethical and technological: how to listen to thousands of testimonies of Holocaust survivors as an integral body of voices and stories rather than a collection of fragmentary items in a database. In this talk, Hebrew University Researchers Renana Keydar and Eitan Wagner will examine the meeting point between testimony and computation, the new possibilities inherent in such an encounter, and the challenges and risks involved.