Digital Visualization of Holocaust Spaces: The Broader Perspective

Chair: Jeremy Mikecz, Digital Humanities and History, USC

• Erik Steiner (Stanford University, Digital Humanities), Anne Kelly Knowles (University of Maine, History)
  “Ways of Seeing: Problems and Possibilities in Holocaust Visualization”

• Caroline Sturdy Colls (Staffordshire University, Forensic Archaeology and Genocide Investigation)
  “Imagining the Unimaginable: Archeologically-derived Visualizations of Holocaust Landscapes”

• Anika Walke (Washington University in St. Louis, History)
  “Visualizing the Holocaust in Belarus: Communal Experiences and Memories of Genocide

Jeremy Mikecz is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Digital Humanities at the University of Southern California. Jeremy is a historian doing research at the intersection of geography and ethno-, social, and digital history. His current research combines old-fashioned archival research and ‘close reading’ with digital text analysis and mapping to reconstruct indigenous activity and its role in shaping the events of conquest-era Peru. More broadly, his research experiments with the use of digital tools to reconstruct the history of marginalized people. In other words, this work proposes an agenda and a methodology for a ‘digital history from below. Jeremy’s work was most recently published in the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (Edinburgh University Press, March 2017): “Peering beyond the Imperial Gaze: Using Digital Tools to Construct a Spatial History of Conquest.” http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/ijhac.2017.0177 A summary of his work can also be found at jeremymikecz.com.

Anika Walke, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis. Anika was educated at the University of Oldenburg, Germany and the State University of St. Petersburg, Russia, before she completed her doctorate at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Anika’s research and teaching interests include World War II and Nazi genocide, migration, nationality policies, and oral history in the (former) Soviet Union and Europe. Her book, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015), weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. A current research project is devoted to the long aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II. In particular, she examines how people remember and live with the effects and repercussions of systematic violence in Belarus.

Erik Steiner is the Co-Director and co-founder of the Spatial History Project at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University and a former President of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). He is an interaction designer and cartographer working at the intersection of technology, creative arts, and academic scholarship in the humanities and social, and environmental sciences. He has led the design and development of dozens of interactive and information design projects through major grants from the Getty, Kress and Mellon Foundations, NEH, NSF, and ACLS. His recent collaborative work includes Geographies of the Holocaust, Kindred London, and the Genealogy of Ant Colonies, The Rodolfo Lanciani Digital Archive.

Caroline Sturdy Colls is an Associate Professor of Forensic Archaeology and Genocide Investigation at Staffordshire University specialising in Holocaust studies. She is also the Research Lead and founder of the Centre of Archaeology at the same institution. Her research focuses on the application of interdisciplinary approaches to the investigation of Holocaust landscapes, with a particular focus on forensic and archaeological techniques, and the ethical issues that surround their implementation. She has undertaken archaeological investigations at Treblinka extermination and labour camps in Poland, the sites pertaining to the slave labour programme in Alderney (the Channel Islands), the former Semlin Judenlager and Anhaltlager (Serbia), Bergen-Belsen (Germany), and numerous killing sites in Poland and Ukraine.  She is a member of the UKHMF Education Advisory Group, appointed by the UK Government, and the author of numerous publications focused on Holocaust archaeology and missing persons investigations at sites of mass violence.