Mapping Social Networks and Personal Experiences

Chair: Gabor Toth, Digital Humanities and History, Yale University

• Paris Papamichos Chronakis (University of Illinois, Chicago, History)
  “From the Lone Survivor to the Network Self. Social Networks Meet the Digital Holocaust Archive”

• Andrew Curtis (Kent State University, Geography), James Tyner (Kent State University, Geography), Sokvisal Kimsroy (Kent State University, Geography)
  “Genocide Spatial Video Geo-narratives: Mapping the Personal Experiences of Victims of the Khmer Rouge”

• Eric Le Bourhis (FMS/ISP, History)
  “Spatialization of the Holocaust and Digital Tools: The City of Paris as a local case study: research and curation”

Gabor Toth is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Tóth earned his BA in Italian Literature and Language from Eötvös Lórand Science University, Budapest, his MA in Medieval Studies from Central European University, Budapest, and his PhD in History from the University of Oxford. His doctoral dissertation, entitled “Thinking and Knowledge in Renaissance Florence: a Computer Assisted Analysis of the Diaries and Commonplace Books of Giovanni Rucellai and his Contemporaries,” built on archival research of the knowledge system in early modern Italy to argue “that the transition from oral to literate culture produced quantitative and qualitative changes in human thought.” Tóth has won many awards, including a 2015 Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Center for Humanities and the 2016 Gerda Henkel Fellowship in Digital History at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He has worked and is fluent in Hungarian, Italian, French and German. His work has been published in journals including Oxford’s Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing, the CEU Annual of Medieval Studies and Fondazione Cini’s Studi Venezi. Tóth is also the founder and co-organizer of Hi-Cor, an interdisciplinary research group of historians and computational/corpus linguists at Oxford University.

Eric Le Bourhis is an historian and author of a dissertation on the transformations of the Soviet city of Riga after 1945 (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, EHESS, Paris, 2015). As a specialist of urban history and history of housing, he is currently posted to the Institute for Political Social Sciences (ISP, CNRS-UPN-ENS Paris Saclay) in Nanterre (Paris region). Since 2015, he has been leading with Isabelle Backouche and Sarah Gensburger an investigation centered on the “re-leasing” in 1943-1944 of nearly 9,000 Parisian apartments formerly inhabited by Jewish families. This research, focused on the archives of the housing department of the Prefecture of the Seine brings a profound knowledge of the anti-Semitic spoliation in Paris. His experience with spatial analysis and historical GIS serve as a driving methodological force for the team. Thanks to a post-doc fellowship from the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah (2016-2018), Le Bourhis is also conducting research on the spoliation of Jewish housing in Riga in 1941-1942. He examines the social interactions around the redistribution of apartments of Jewish families who had fled, been evicted, arrested, or interned in the ghetto, and the phenomena of cohabitation with non-Jews and exclusion in the months preceding the hermetic sealing of the ghetto in October 1941. Fluent in Latvian, German, and Russian, Le Bourhis is familiar with German, French, Latvian and Russian archives. Last publication: https://www.politika.io/en/notice/opportunities-and-antisemitism-housing-in-paris-19431944.

Andrew Curtis (Director of the GIS Health and Hazards Lab at Kent State University) is a former Director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Remote Sensing and GIS for Public Health. His work employs geospatial technologies and geographic information system (GIS) analysis to support neighborhood scale intervention strategies. He has developed a spatial video methodology that includes data collection, spatial layer creation and fine scale spatial analysis for use in mapping any challenging environment. Added to this are geonarratives which are environment inspired dialogue that can be mapped and analyzed to provide contextual insight to traditional spatial analysis. These approaches have also been modified for landscapes of crime, health, marginalized populations, and most recently the genocide landscapes of Cambodia.

Paris Papamichos Chronakis is Lecturer in Modern Greek History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research explores the transition of the Eastern Mediterranean port-cities from empire to nation-state bringing together the interrelated histories of Sephardic Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Muslim entrepreneurial elites. With Giorgos Antoniou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece), he has also been developing digital tools to map social networks during the Holocaust. He was a member of the scientific committee developing the “Database of Greek Jewish Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies” and has published on Greco-Jewish relations, Greek Zionism and the Holocaust of Greek Jewry.