Visualization and the Holocaust: Analyzing Space and Place with Digital Methods and Geographical, Textual, and Visual Sources

This public conference seeks to reflect synthetically on the first decade of historical and spatial analysis of the Holocaust through the use of digital methods. What interpretive problems are illuminated by different physical, textual, and visual sources, such as physical killing sites, bureaucratic documents and postwar survivor interview transcripts, photographs and maps? What digital methods can manage and integrate large volumes of diverse historical evidence that has previously been used in depth mainly in locally focused case studies? How can we use the iterative process of computational analysis as a positive mode of inquiry to ask more probing and complex questions? And what new insights could computational approaches yield?

In addition to presentations on how digital methods have been used in analyzing the Holocaust (with beneficial and problematic results), the conference also seeks to broaden the scope and impact of such a discussion by opening up a dialogue with digital historians and visualization experts from a broader range of fields outside of the study of the Holocaust.