Placing the Holocaust Project

Studying experiences of the Holocaust should not be limited to what happened in identifiable, or familiar, named places such as camps or ghettos, cities or villages. Many of the most important events of the Holocaust occurred in unnamed places. For most, physical and temporal disorientation were a real part of what it meant to be a victim of Nazi violence. Our approach to analyzing testimony transcripts recognizes the importance of the unnamed street corner, fence, farm, or hill in both survivor testimonies and conceptualizations of Holocaust landscapes generally.

As a part of the University of Maine’s Placing the Holocaust project, we created a taxonomy of nine place categories to capture this wide array of both unnamed and named places. We were able to train a model to annotate 977 post-war testimony transcripts from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). The final outcome of the project includes creating an open access site with both a search engine of the transcripts and a mapping tool (forthcoming summer 2024). In releasing our data, we hope that others can build from our methodology to implement their own place-based approach to analyzing their corpus, Holocaust-related or not, and develop their own methods to analyzing testimony transcripts. Please share your work with us!

Acknowledgements

This project, based in the University of Maine’s History Department (Anne Kelly Knowles, PI), has been funded by National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement grant no. HAA-287827-22; a Collaborative Research Seed Grant, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis; the Clement and Linda McGillicuddy Humanities Center, University of Maine; and the Dale Benson Gift Fund, University of Maine.