Three Institutions, Three Platforms, One Goal: Social Media for Holocaust Memory

The use of digital technologies and social media has become an increasingly significant means for engagement in many fields, and that of cultural heritage is no exception. Specifically, Holocaust museums have long been committed to providing historical and educational content to their audiences, and to this end digital communication channels and social media in particular figure among the means employed. Despite this, relatively few research studies have investigated the potential of Holocaust museums' use of social media as new memory ecologies. This preliminary study investigates how three prominent Holocaust museums (Yad Vashem in Israel, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland) use Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to enhance knowledge and understanding of historical and remembrance events among the general public. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analysed the museums' social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to investigate the topics and phrases that appear most often in the posted contents. Through latent semantic analyses, we determined the words most frequently used by the three museums themselves and within the three social media channels. Additionally, we employed topic modelling to determine underlying themes. This approach allowed us to identify possible similarities and differences between the museums' communication output and their social media channels. Moreover, to illustrate these potential similarities and differences, we also conducted 2-Mode network analyses. Our results show that the museums' use of each social media channel exhibits different types of topical foci. For example, Twitter posts specifically include terminology on "education", Facebook communication is more centred on the "camps" and the "Nazi" regime, while on Instagram the combination of "murdered" and "photo" can often be found. Furthermore, similarities were also found, namely that the topic of "Auschwitz" is omnipresent and that all museums appear to focus on the 1941-1945 timeframe.