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 geographical circumstances and major societal shifts, exploring topics from Welsh emigration to the United States to why American entrepreneurs struggled to match the productivity of the British iron industry. Now, Knowles is working with a team of historians and geographers to create a digital platform for students and educators to trace the geographies of the Holocaust and connect victimsʼ stories to the places where they happened.
The project was recently awarded a $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, which supports innovative, experimental or computationally challenging digital projects that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching and public programming in the humanities.
“I have been very fortunate to receive a number of NEH grants for my Holocaust research. This one will enable me to share the results of years of work with a global audience. Mapping history with GIS is now mainstream in the Digital Humanities. Itʼs exciting that the University of Maine can contribute to this important trend,” Knowles says.
While Nazi actions were often recorded and can be mapped with geographic coordinates, the places of Holocaust victim experiences are difficult to map because their locations are vague or unknown and can only be located relatively.
You can read much more in the University of Maine web site at: https://bit.ly/3QFPlsB.