Uses of the sensitive past in the digital environment: the “Brasil: Nunca Mais Digital” collection and the “eva.stories” project

Abstract

This article reflects on sensitive uses of the past in the digital environment. To attain this aim, two initiatives are approached as objects of analysis: “Brasil Nunca Mais Digital” [the “Brazil: Never Again” digital collection] and “eva.stories”. The first of these initiatives is the project launched in 2013, which inserts the “Brasil: Nunca Mais” documentation into the digital age by making its archives accessible to anyone anywhere in the world (as previously, it was only available in physical, printed or microfilmed collections). The second initiative is the “eva.stories” project, created in 2019 with the following premise: “What if a girl in the Holocaust had Instagram?” It uses Instagram (mainly, its “stories”-feature) to produce seventy episodes depicting events with Eva Heyman – a 13-year-old girl sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944. The aim of this paper is to put these initiatives into perspective (considering their respective historical, technical and methodological contexts, among other aspects) to think about their uses and examine the effects of the instrumentalization of the past in the digital environment (and in the field of public history). Its final purpose is to reflect on the role of the Internet as a catalyst of ways to disseminate, resist and think about memory and traumatic events, while understanding its interactions with different audiences.