Spatial, Textual, and Network Approaches to Holocaust Research

This panel brings together papers that integrate Digital Humanities methods into historical research on the Holocaust. The digital turn has created new opportunities to analyze large corpora of documentation and to explore new research questions. For Holocaust research specifically, a field characterized by extensive and dispersed documentation, these tools have opened new ways of approaching sources and historical interpretation. In this panel, each paper presents a distinct area of Holocaust research with both a broad geographic scope and a different thematic focus. Moreover, each paper employs a different method and set of tools — from computational text analysis, to GIS, and social network analysis — highlighting the wide range of possibilities digital methods offer Holocaust research. The first paper uses QGIS to map Jewish internment sites in Vichy France, transforming archival reports into spatial data in order to trace patterns of confinement over time. This approach also reveals new insights into Jewish detention within the French system between 1940 and 1944. The second paper demonstrates the use of textual analysis through distant reading methodologies, showing how computational linguistic approaches can uncover structural patterns and shifts in historiographical discourse that are not readily visible through conventional close reading. The third paper applies network analysis tools to the study of rescue networks, examining how rescuers operated within broader social structures and revealing connections that are difficult to trace through traditional historical research alone. Taken together, the papers raise broader methodological and historiographical questions about what is gained when Holocaust sources are translated into data. More broadly, the panel asks how digital methodologies reshape the kinds of questions historians can ask, the patterns they can identify, and the ways Holocaust history can be interpreted.