Paul Jaskot: “Using Digital Humanities to Understand the Architecture of the Holocaust”

Paul Jaskot, Professor of Art History and Director of the Wired! Lab, Duke University

The Holocaust was a profoundly spatial experience that involved not only the movement of millions of European Jews but also their confinement and murder in sites specifically built for the genocide. Paul Jaskot's talk addresses how perpetrators thought of their building projects and, conversely, how victims experienced these oppressive spaces. Analyzing the architecture of the Holocaust helps us in understanding the larger development, implementation, and context of this crucial event. In addition to an architectural plan and a specific survivor testimony as examples, the lecture also explores how recent methods in Digital Humanities — particularly digital mapping — can be used to investigate plans and testimonies to raise new questions about the architectural and historical significance of the Holocaust.