Holocaust Geographies Collaborative
Maria Zalewska
In 2007, an interdisciplinary group of scholars with interest in both the Holocaust and geography came together for a two-week summer workshop at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (CAHS) at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Their goal was ambitious: to expand our understanding of the Shoah by employing key geographic concepts of location, scale, space, place, and territoriality. Among them, there were specialists in history, Holocaust, and genocide studies (Dr. Waitman Beorn; Dr. Simone Gigliotti; Dr. Anna Holian), geography and social history (Prof. Tim Cole; Prof. Alberto Giordano; Dr. Anne Kelly Knowles), art history (Prof. Paul Jaskot), geographic information science (GIScience), interactive information visualizations, and cartography (Erik B. Steiner).
Bringing together diverse set of methodologies and expertise, they set out to answer questions about the study of the Holocaust that few had asked before: “how much insight and understanding one can gain by asking spatial questions and employing spatial methods to investigate even the most familiar subjects in the history of the Holocaust” and “how spatial analysis and geographical visualization of the built environment and forced movement of people during the Holocaust might inspire new research questions and pedagogical applications”. Indeed, this was the first major attempt at defining and operationalizing "geographies of the Holocaust".
Since the spatio-temporal focus of the study lends itself well to visualization, the affordances of GIScience became central to setting priorities and defining broad themes for the group’s research. Questions of “when?” and “where?” studied at different levels of scale - from individual to collective - allowed the scholars to generate visualizations that “combine multiple variables, display change over time, and combine and manipulate information from huge sets of statistical data1.” This, in turn, allowed “for a wide range of new analytical approaches to even the most familiar evidence from the period.” In other words, the Holocaust Geography Collaborative culls from historical data sets (like the Holocaust Museum archives and Registry of Survivors databases) to then capture, represent, and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze its geographic aspects, which in turn serve as a starting point for new original academic inquiries.
What new information can we learn from using mapping and geography to examine spaces and places of the Holocaust?