Placing the Holocaust: A Digital Platform for Exploring the Intersecting Places of Victims and Perpetrators

FAIN: HAA-287827-22

University of Maine, Orono (Orono, ME 04473-1513)
Anne Kelly Knowles (Project Director: January 2022 to present)

The development of a new research and learning platform that brings together spatial and linguistic data extracted from historical records and oral histories to support and teach spatial studies of the Holocaust.

We propose to build a prototype, multi-part, interactive website that will generate new insights into the role of places in genocide and survival while providing a platform for teaching and spatial thinking about the Holocaust. The website will share 14 years of data developed during the team’s research on the geographies of the Holocaust. The site’s unprecedentedly rich content will include detailed data on 1,111 SS-administered concentration and labor camps and 1,142 Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe, with camps and ghettos dynamically linked to sites of experience described in 4,000 transcripts of survivor interviews. This project will demonstrate a new model for humanistic mapping that combines GIS with computational linguistics. The website will provide user-tested teaching materials, sample maps, and full documentation to support use in high school and college classes, as well as carefully checked data and a digital Holocaust gazetteer for scholarly research.