EHRI Academic Conference

Researching the Holocaust in the Digital Age

18 June 2024

Polish Center for Holocaust Research, Staszic Palace 

Nowy Swiat 72, Warsaw, Poland

Organized by EHRI partners including the Polish Center for Holocaust Research

YOU CAN NOW WATCH THE RECORDING OF THE LIVE-STREAM BELOW OR ON OUR YouTube channel. 

On Tuesday 18 June 2024, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project convened the international academic conference “Researching the Holocaust in the Digital Age” at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

This international conference for archivists and researchers evaluated Holocaust-related research in the digital age, the current state of documentation and study of the Holocaust, and the role that EHRI plays in supporting and advancing these areas.

In October 2023, EHRI published a Call for Proposals for this conference, which resulted in many excellent submissions. The conference featured conference papers as well as a ‘marketplace’ of poster presentations relating to both Holocaust research and EHRI’s future development in Europe and beyond.

READ A FULL REPORT OF THE CONFERENCE

FINAL PROGRAMME

09:15 – 10:00   Coffee and Registration

10:00 – 10:05   Welcome by Barbara Engelking, Director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw

10:05 – 10:20   The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), introduction by EHRI Co-Director, Karel Berkhoff

10:20 – 12:00   Session 1 – New Digital Research Methods and Innovations

Chair: Michal Frankl, Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia

• 10:20 – 10:40   Reference and Information Services in Yad Vashem Archives – Opportunities and Challenges of the Digital Era – Yael Robinson Gottfeld, Yad Vashem, Israel
• 10:40 – 11:00   Cartographic Representation of the Krakow Ghetto: A Distorted Image of Tragedy – Stanislaw Szombara, AGH University of Science and Technology and Alicja Jarkowska, Jagiellonian University, Poland
• 11:00 – 11:20   Streamlining the Creation of Holocaust-related Digital Editions with Automatic Tools – Floriane Chiffoleau and Sarah Beniere, Inria, France
• 11:20 – 12:00   Querying the Archive: Relational Database Design and the Study of Holocaust-Era Materials – Emily Klein, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• 11:40 – 12:00   Q & A

12:00 – 13:30   Lunch and Poster Presentations*

13:30 – 15:00  Session 2 – Exploring the Use of Digital Techniques in Holocaust Research

Chair: Rachel Pistol, King’s College London, UK

• 13:30 – 13:50   Interacting with Restless Archive: Sustainability and Archival Aggregation in Long-Form Digital Storytelling Platforms – Simone Gigliotti, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
• 13:50 – 14:10   Unveiling Patterns: Exploring Socio-Demographic Characteristics as Predictive Factors for Deportation of Jews Registered in Bruxelles in 1940, Using Binary Logistic Regression – Adina Babeş-Fruchter, KU Leuven, Belgium
• 14:10 – 14:30   Natural Language Processing Meets Holocaust Research – Martin Wynne, University of Oxford, UK
• 14:30 – 14:50   Digital Heritage Related to Nazi Persecution: Reactualisation of Collective Memory of the Holocaust through a Virtual Interactive Exploration Platform – Aliisa Råmark and Héctor López-Carral, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
• 14:50 – 15.10   Q & A

15:10 – 15:40   Tea and Coffee Break

15:40 – 17:20   Session 3 – Exploring the Use of Digital Techniques in Holocaust Research

Chair: Karel Berkhoff, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide, The Netherlands

• 15:40 – 16:00   Integrating Citizen Science in the Digital Age as a Sustainable Innovation in Holocaust Research: Participatory Research, Presentation and Transformation – Inka Engel, University of Koblenz, Germany
• 16:00 – 16:20   Digital Humanities and Multiscalar Approaches to the Holocaust: The Case of the Brest-Litovsk Ghetto – Boris Czerny, Université de Caen-Normandie, France
• 16:20 – 16:40   Mass Grave Investigations of Holocaust Victims in the Digital Age: Strategies for Searching in Ukraine – Daria Cherkaska, Staffordshire University, UK
• 16:40 – 17:00   Memory Wars and Digitized Denialism: The Rehabilitation of a Romanian War Criminal – Adina Marincea, “Elie Wiesel National” Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania, Romania
• 17:00 – 17:20   Q & A

17:20 – 17:30   Closing Remarks

17:30 – 18:00   Drinks

18:00 – 20:00   Buffet Dinner

* Poster Presentations:

• What Are Good Examples of the Opportunities for Holocaust Research in the Digital Age? The Example of Visual History Archives – Alessandro Matta, Sardinian Shoah Memorial Association, Italy
• “The Sunflower”: Narrating the History of Wiesenthal’s Book Through a Digital Online Edition – EHRI-Team (VWI), Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Austria
• Knowledge Modelling with Holocaust Testimonies – Isuri Anadhuri, University of Lancaster, UK
• Repurposing Holocaust-related digital scholarly editions to develop multilingual domain-specific named entity recognition tools – Maria Dermentzi, King’s College London, UK, and Hugo Scheithauer, Inria, France
• Project “Evaluating and Publishing Files on Compensation Cases” (https://kittl.arbeiterarchiv.de) – Steffen Müller, Bundesarchiv, Germany
• Tracing the ways of Jewish removal goods seized and auctioned in Hamburg and Bremen – The Lost Lift Database – Jacqueline Malchow, German Maritime Museum, Germany
• The Language of Emotions in a Digital Project about the Holocaust – Pawel Rams and Agnieszka Zalotynska, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland

Image of Staszic Palace by Tilman2007 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62112573.