Description
This presentation examines the rise of necro-nominalism: the practice of systematically inscribing the names of the dead. This expanded the franchise of memory, building on advances in bureaucracy, record-keeping, and design to create comprehensive registers that ground memorials.
Naming the dead has military antecedents; Menin Gate, in Belgium, one of the best known WWI memorials, revolutionized commemorative practice. It used a specially-designed typeface to list the names of over 50,000 Commonwealth soldiers with no known grave. Nearly a century later, designers working on the 9/11 Memorial employed algorithms to create “meaningful adjacencies” among victims’ names who, like the WWI dead, often lacked physical remains.
Contemporary memorialization remains stubbornly tactile, relying on impervious stone and bronze, but new technologies are always deployed to track, record, and present names in these individual, and collective, sites of memory. Here, I explore how data visualization has served the deeply human need to commemorate loss.
