DU Recommends: Digitalities of Russia’s War against Ukraine

Date: 8-9 October 2026 

Location:  Hybrid & Herder Institute Lecture Hall (Behring Villa), Gisonenweg 5-7, 35037 Marburg

Organizers: Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe; Leibniz Association; with funding from the Federal Ministry of the Interior; the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Arts and Culture 

Language: English

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The workshop explores how the war in Ukraine can be documented and represented in ways that adequately reflect the complexity of wartime experiences in the respective medium.

The workshop will kick off with a keynote speech on the movie Ember, a 12‑minute animated documentary produced within the U‑CORE project at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg. U‑CORE, active in Ukraine, Poland, and Luxembourg, collects, archives and analyses testimonies of Ukrainian civilians displaced by Russia’s full‑scale invasion launched in February 2022. Ember translates one of the testimonies collected in Luxembourg into animated form, following an elderly Ukrainian woman and her husband as they endure Russian occupation and ultimately flee their home in the Kyiv suburbs during the early weeks of the war.

The presentation examines the transformation of this oral testimony into an animated documentary that relies almost entirely on non‑verbal communication. It investigates the visualisation strategies used and their interpretive implications. It compares systematically the soundscape, the colour palette, and the emotional landscape of the original testimony and of the animated film, in order to assess the power of animation to narrate the witnessing of displacement and war.

The second part of the workshop focuses on the emergence of new practices, both in scientific knowledge production and the stewardship of testimonies, as well as in military funerals, where evolving rituals are reshaping musical traditions. In addition to examining and questioning established practices, the workshop will address the legal dimensions of documenting war crimes and the protection of personal data when archiving sensitive materials.

Objectives of the Workshop:

• Explore emerging research on the digital dimensions of Russia’s war against Ukraine, including digital heritage, wartime documentation, media representations of wartime experiences.
• Foster dialogue on living archives, including questions of ethics, access, preservation, representation, and digital methodologies.
• Create opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange between fellows, researchers, practitioners, and invited guests.

Registration for online participation is required; however, registrations can be accommodated at short notice. Registration for in-person attendance is appreciated to facilitate planning. 

Please register via: livarch@herder-institut.de

Thursday, October 8

18:00–18:10    Welcome and Opening Remarks
18:10–19:00    Keynote Presentation  “From Voice To Visual. The Transformation of a Ukrainian Testimony of the War to an Animation Documentary”
Machteld Venken & Iryna Yeroshko
19:00–19:30    Discussion
19:30    Informal Dinner (self-paid)

Friday, October 9

09:30    Bus Arrival
09:45–10:00    Welcome Coffee

Session I: Emerging practices. Testimony stewardship and ritual reinvention
10:00–10:35    Nataliia Otrishchenko & Anna Wylegała — Sensitive Information in War Testimonies: Temporal and Social Dimensions
10:35–11:10    Inna Shvorak — Military Funerals as Living Archives: Sound, Ritual, and Digital Documentation in Wartime Ukraine 
11:10–11:40    Coffee Break

Session II: Legal dimension of war documentation. Between Evidence and Archive
11:40–12:15    Viktoriia Hulenko — Ukraine as a Laboratory for Living Archives: Digital Technologies and the Documentation of War Crimes 
12:15–12:50    Ganna Sarybaieva — From Working Records to Living Archives: The Legal Status of Wartime Documentary Materials and the Limits of Archiving
12:50–13:15    Concluding Discussion and Closing Remarks
13:30–14:30    Lunch Break / Free Time
14:30–15:30    Optional Guided Tour of the Herder Institute and its Collections

Photo: Bohdan Yemets / Lviv Center for Urban History