Anne Knowles believes that places provide important information about historical events. The University of Maine professor and graduate coordinator in the history department has made an academic career studying the relationship between geographic circumstances and major social changes, exploring topics from Welsh emigration to the United States to why American entrepreneurs struggled to match the productivity of the British iron industry. Knowles is now working with a team of historians and geographers to create a digital platform for students and faculty to trace the geography of the Holocaust and connect victims’ stories to the places where they happened.

The project recently received $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Advancement in the Digital Humanities Grant.which supports innovative, experimental, or computationally challenging digital projects that can scale to improve research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities.

“I have been very fortunate to receive a number of grants from the NEH for my research on the Holocaust. This will allow me to share the results of years of work with a global audience. Mapping history with GIS is now mainstream in the digital humanities. It is exciting that the University of Maine can contribute to this important trend,” says Knowles.

Although Nazi actions were often recorded and can be mapped with geographic coordinates, the locations of Holocaust victims are difficult to map because their locations are unclear or unknown and can only be located relatively.

Knowles worked with collaborators, including Paul Jascott, professor of art, art history and visual studies at Duke University, to create a website that will share 14 years of data combining GIS analysis with corpus and computational linguistics to explore the geographic connections between 1,111 SS camps, 1,142 Jewish ghettos and approximately 4,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

Although there are now many websites about the Holocaust, none have provided detailed data on camps and ghettos that users can explore like the Knowles project.

“Our project aims to teach spatial thinking while empowering students and scholars to do geographic research. By connecting personal accounts to specific places, camps and ghettos will take on meaning and emotion,” says Knowles.

Knowles co-founded the Collaborative Geographies of the Holocaust. In 2014, this interdisciplinary group published the first book showing how geographical methods can illuminate the places and spaces of the Holocaust. However, this website will contain the most comprehensive data and maps of SS-run camps and ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe, as well as linking the actions of the perpetrators with witness statements, providing pedagogical assistance and supporting online mapping capabilities.

The website will allow users to switch between close readings of personal accounts of the impact of changes on living spaces from interview transcripts and more distant regional and continental patterns of these changes introduced by the Nazis and their collaborators. The purpose of the website is to encourage users to think about the Holocaust in new ways by highlighting the shocking number, ubiquity and variety of SS camps throughout the Reich beyond the well-known Auschwitz and ghettoization in occupied Eastern Europe beyond major urban areas such as Warsaw and Lodz.

All data on the website will be publicly available and downloadable. The website will also include materials that suggest ways to use the website in class assignments and in research.

“After years of writing and lecturing publicly about the deep geographies of the Holocaust, I want to share the spatial insights I’ve gained with the digital generation. Maps are a great visual learning tool. We also want the website to improve geographic literacy. Americans can better understand current events in Europe — such as the current war in Ukraine — if they learn about previous struggles in the region,” Knowles says.

Knowles says her Holocaust research at UMaine has involved more than a dozen undergraduate and graduate students. This project will enhance student participation through the employment of two PhD students. students and allowed Knowles to hire several new members of the student body.

The final product will be on a public website hosted by the University of Maine. It will also be promoted on the websites of partner institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, Facing History, and Northwestern University’s Holocaust Education Foundation.

Contact: Sam Shipani, samantha.schipani@maine.edu