2017 Curt C. and Else Silberman Seminar for University Faculty
Visualizing the Holocaust and the Use of Digital Humanities in the Classroom
June 5–16, 2017

This year’s Silberman seminar explores how Digital Humanities offers new opportunities for students and faculty to understand the history of the Holocaust and its representation.

Digital Humanities and the Holocaust

Mapping, data visualization, and text analysis invite new modes of thinking about the experiences of Jews during the Final Solution as well as the way survivors have remembered and commemorated this history over the last 75 years. At the same time, the intersection of Holocaust studies and online tools raises issues of contemporary concern: How is knowledge about the Holocaust transmitted to audiences around the world?

Together, we will explore a range of digital tools, including Omeka.net, Storymaps, and Voyant, that can be used to consider this central question. We will work with resources held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s extensive Holocaust archives and develop strategies for incorporating new methods and sources into undergraduate courses focused on the Holocaust.

DH in the Holocaust Classroom

Bringing these tools into the classroom helps students reimagine this history and enables them to engage directly with primary sources, inviting them to participate in the interpretive work of Holocaust scholars. For example, when they are challenged to represent space during the Holocaust, they grapple with the tension between the global and individual scale of destruction. When they are invited to create a small digital archive, they recognize the choices made in building collections.

We will discuss strategies for successfully integrating digital tools into your syllabi and balancing Holocaust content with digital experimentation. We will also examine how a critical approach to online tools can lead to better representation and teaching of Holocaust memory and history in an age of social media and alternative facts.

Seminar Leaders

The seminar will be led by Rachel Deblinger, Director, Digital Scholarship Commons at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Paul Jaskot, Professor in the History of Art & Architecture Department as well as Director of Studio CHI (Computing/Humanities Interface) at DePaul University.