Private loss, public memory : an ethnography of the Holocaust memorial exhibition Faces of Loss
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This investigation consisted of an ethnographic study of the memorial exhibition Faces of Loss mounted at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. The exhibit was based on scanned images of original pre-Holocaust pictures of the victims of the Holocaust whose families now live in Vancouver. Pictures of deceased relatives, confined for years in the privacy of survivors’ and second generations’ homes, were publicly displayed. In conducting this ethnography, the researcher became a participant observer during the production and public display of the exhibition. Data were generated through descriptive fieldnotes, personal journal entries, twenty-eight individual interviews that included Holocaust survivors, child survivors and second generation, and one group interview with nine child survivors. The data analysis suggests that bringing their private losses to the public arena proved therapeutic for the participants. The images displayed allowed them to honour the memory of their relatives and provided the participants with a forum to talk about their losses. The exhibition became a medium for the wider community to bear witness to the participants’ trauma, offering the Holocaust survivors and their children the healing experience associated with testimonial acts. The exhibition also engaged participants in collective remembrance and mourning practices. The display of visual images played a crucial role in facilitating these processes among the participants. It follows that local Holocaust museums, as cultural places, could be turned into venues for facilitating memorial and therapeutic processes among Holocaust survivors and their children. By exploring the role of museums as forums for bringing private losses into public space, this study sheds light on the therapeutic use of community-based settings for individuals and groups who have undergone psychosocial trauma.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".