UTokyo 150th Anniversary Session

“AI and Memory”

Digital technologies, including AI, are helping to reshape archives from static “stocks” of information into dynamic infrastructures that connect memory, place, and lived experience across time. By linking testimonies, images, and records of atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to geographic space, archives become narrative “flows” through which people engage with history and unfolding crises. Born-digital materials, including social media posts, open new possibilities for real-time archiving of crises, from the Gaza Strip to areas affected by the Noto Peninsula Earthquake. The central question to be explored: how can people and institutions—not technology alone—sustain inclusive practices that bridge collective memory with present experience?

This session is held as part of the University of Tokyo's 150th Anniversary Commemoration and serves as its tenth Countdown Event.