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Center for Advanced Genocide Research


Beyond the Basics: The Capacities of GIS for Analyzing the Holocaust Spaces

Chair: Cyrus Shahabi, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Spatial Sciences, USC

  • Alberto Giordano (Texas State University, Geography)
    “The Expanded Potential of GIS for the Study of the Holocaust”

 

  • Anne Kelly Knowles (University of Maine, History), Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University, Art History), Justus Hillebrand (University of Maine, History)
    “GIS and Corpus Linguistics: Mixed Digital Methods for the Exploration of Forced Labor in Krakow District Ghettos”

 

  • Tim Cole (University of Bristol, History), Alberto Giordano (Texas State University, Geography)
    “GIS and Corpus Linguistics: Ghetto Space and the Place of the Ghetto in Budapest”

 

  • Maël LeNoc (Texas State University, Geography)
    “Using GIS to study family arrests and separations during the Holocaust in Italy”

 

Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Spatial Sciences, and the chair of the Computer Science Department. He is also the Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) and the Informatics Program at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. He was the CTO and co-founder of a USC spin-off, Geosemble Technologies, which was acquired in July 2012. Since then, he founded another company, ClearPath (recently rebranded as TallyGo), focusing on predictive path-planning for car navigation systems. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. He authored two books and more than three hundred research papers in databases, GIS and multimedia with more than 12 US Patents.

Dr. Shahabi was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) from 2004 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) from 2010-2013 and VLDB Journal from 2009-2015. He is currently the chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2017-2020 term and also on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He is the founding chair of IEEE NetDB workshop and also the general co-chair of SSTD’15, ACM GIS 2007, 2008 and 2009. He chaired the nomination committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2011-2014 terms. He is a PC co-Chair of APWeb+WAIM’2017 and the PhD workshop of ICDE 2018. In the past, he has been PC co-chair of several conferences such as BigComp’2016, MDM’2016, DASFAA 2015, IEEE MDM 2013 and IEEE BigData 2013, and regularly serves on the program committee of major conferences such as VLDB, SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, and ACM Multimedia.

Dr. Shahabi is a fellow of IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist award in 2009, the 2003 U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER award in 2002, and the 2001 Okawa Foundation Research Grant for Information and Telecommunications. He was also a recipient of the US Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) faculty fellowship award in 2011 and 2012, an organizer of the 2011 National Academy of Engineering “Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering” program, an invited speaker in the 2010 National Research Council (of the National Academies) Committee on New Research Directions for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and a participant in the 2005 National Academy of Engineering “Frontiers of Engineering” program.

 

Maël Le Noc is a PhD student in Geography at Texas State University working under the supervision of Alberto Giordano. He grew up in France and received his master’s degree in Geography from Texas State University in May 2016. His main research interests include historical GIS and the Geography of the Holocaust, with a focus on family separations. He also cooperates with the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative research group.

 

Anne Kelly Knowles has been a leading figure in the Digital and Spatial Humanities, particularly in the methodologies of Historical GIS, for more than twenty years. She has written or edited five books, including Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008); Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (2013); and Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). Anne’s pioneering work with historical GIS has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including the American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship (Smithsonian magazine, 2012) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). She is a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, an international group of historians and geographers who explore the spatial aspects of the Holocaust through digital scholarship.

 

Paul B. Jaskot is professor of art history and the Director of the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History and Visual Culture at Duke University. His work focuses on the political history of Nazi art and architecture as well as its postwar cultural impact. He is the author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy as well as The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right. In addition, for the past decade, he has been a member of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze the spatial history of the Holocaust. From 2014-2016, Jaskot was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).

 

Dr. Alberto Giordano is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at Texas State University. He started his professional career in Italy working as a cartographer and as a GIS analyst and designer for private and public organizations. His early research focused on the application of Geographic Information Science methods to historical cartography, policy analysis, and human geography. In 2007, Alberto joined Tim Cole and Anne Knowles in organizing the interdisciplinary research group now called the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, and was a co-editor of the group’s first book, Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). In the past ten years, his research has focused on the geography of Holocaust and genocide and on spatial forensics. For his Holocaust research, Alberto has been awarded grants and research funding by the NSF, the NEH, and several Holocaust-related institutions. His service includes membership in the International Cartographic Association Commissions on Maps and the Internet and on Spatial Data Quality, the Italian (UNINFO) and European (CEN) standardization agencies, and other national and international organizations. Currently, he is on the board of the National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE), the Race Ethnicity and Place Conference series, and the journal Southwestern Geographer. He is also President Elect of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGS). He is affiliated with the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California.