Space and Place in Holocaust Studies: What We Have Learned and Future Research

This lecture will draw on over ten years of collaborative interdisciplinary research to explore how a range of digital humanities approaches might help us better understand the events and experiences of the Holocaust. Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano’s collaboration started by exploring how spatial analysis, GIS and geo-visualization might contribute to a geographical study of the Holocaust at a variety of scales ranging from the continental through to the individual. While this phase of the research shed light on the structural aspects of the Holocaust—and especially how the Holocaust was organized and carried out spatially—they realized that a quantitative approach tends to favour the perspective of the perpetrator. For an integrated history of the Holocaust, it is essential to insert the perspective of the victim through the study of survivors’ testimonies. Mirroring the organization of the first phase of their research, they are tackling this issue simultaneously at a variety of scales, through both a close reading of individual testimonies and the use of corpus linguistics, social network analysis, and other techniques to scale up from one testimony to hundreds and thousands of narratives. Thus, thus aim at an integrated geography of the Holocaust as well as an integrated history of the event. In this lecture, Cole and Giordano will make the case for such an approach through the combination of a spatial approach to the study of the Holocaust with one that is explicitly based on the construction of the places of the Holocaust by victims, bystanders, and perpetrators. Chaired by: Prof Marilyn Deegan, Professor of Digital Humanities and Honorary Research Fellow, King’s College London.
Admission
Free, registration essential

Website
https://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/Whats-On?item=403

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/am52233?id=EVENT588905