Digital Humanities
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The International Tracing Service archives offer process-generated documents from resettlement programs for displaced persons (DP) after World War II. This paper addresses two key challenges to ongoing research based on those archival holdings: the generation of data; and the visual representation of that data in geographic information systems. Digital history offers the opportunity to go beyond case studies and use the wealth of process-generated documents as se- rial sources for algorithm-based analysis. However, data in that form does not exist as such, and thus needs to be generated – a process that implies interpre- tative acts such as abstraction, normalization, and trans-coding, which are shaped by the character of digital media. Can modeling a DP’s life into a series of events, and digitally processing the resultant data, help to find out more about the agency of DPs negotiating their destiny with the authorities? If the mostly hidden and implicit configurations of digital knowledge production are thoughtfully considered and geostatistical analysis is combined with close readings of selected source documents, hermeneutic and quantitative ap- proaches can be reconciled via digital history. This mixed method approach has implications for research culture and the publication of such data.
During the Holocaust 5.8 million people were killed; most of the victims did not leave behind any record that could help reconstruct their experience. While survivor history has been well studied in the last decades, how millions of voiceless victims experienced their persecutions has remained a terra incognita. Generally, while perpetrator history is well-documented, the voiceless victims’ perspective has resisted any form of documentation; their emotional and mental experiences conveyed through novels and memoirs have remained fragmented and they have often been dismissed as subjective and unreliable. Today Digital History and Digital Humanities offer new forms of inquiry and representations; they can unlock the emotional, mental, and physical realities which voiceless victims of the Holocaust or other genocides were forced to live in.
The web and tomorrow’s historiography. Since the 1990s the world wide web (or simply, the web) has been an integral and important part of the communicative infrastructure of modern societies. On the one hand the web has developed as a new medium in its own right, in continuation of other media types such as newspapers, film, radio and television. On the other hand, the web has been intimately entangled in the social, cultural and political life taking place outside of the web. For example, within the realm of politics the web has been essential for the extreme left and right since the mid 1990s (as a platform for discussion and mobilisation as well as for the diffusion of political ideas). And in everyday life an important part of modern youth culture has for a number of years been closely connected to such web phenomena as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.