Memorials are public sites, usually urban, that promote memory of a collectively shared past. While much research has focused how memorials have shifted in focus from tradition ways of representing heroes and victories to a 'counter memorial' form about victims and loss, little has been done to translate these ideas into concrete methodological strategies for making theoretical advances with empirical research results. This presentation discusses and reflects on the use of a subjective camera (which records first person video and audio) through examples taken from a study of how people experience and relate to contemporary and traditional memorial sites. The subjective camera methodology allows the research to capture the people's contextualized and evolving experience exploring various memorial sites. Memorials are apt for these studies as they are rich in sensory and symbolic features, thus providing a powerful case for investigating remembering as a moment-to-moment embodied process. The authors compare three different strategies of gathering data with this methodology: (a) a post-walk playback interview; (b) a walk-along interview; and (c) a walk-along plus focus group. These three strategies have been implemented at the following memorial sites, respectively: 1) the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, 2) the National September 11 Memorial in New York, and 3) The Valley of the Fallen in El Escorial, Spain. The rationale behind choosing three different memorials is twofold. Firstly, from a methodological point of view, the differences in the architectural structure across the three memorial sites enabled us to test specific ways of collecting data with subcams. Secondly, from a more theoretical perspective, studies on the radical transformation of memorials over the last decades led us to compare traditional memorial sites (Valley of the Fallen) and 'counter-memorials' (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the National September 11 Memorial).
