In today’s increasingly electronic age, digital mapping has become an important tool of historical scholarship, allowing historians to not only share information but to present it in different ways that facilitate new interpretations and conclusions. Conveying historical information through interactive, electronic maps adds a spatial component to the information, allowing readers to locate it within geographically defined context and thus examine how geography influences trends in this data. Mapping the information creates an explicit link between the geographical and historical context of the data, and encourages a holistic approach in which the historian can compare the data to other data based on the relevance of its proximity. Continue reading
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Using photography to shape historical interpretation
I recently undertook a class trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to examine how the museum tells the story of the Holocaust. What struck me most was the way the museum used photographs to convey the horrors of the Holocaust to visitors. Walking through the exhibition, I was confronted continuously with close-up, small portrait photographs of the faces of holocaust victims, generally placed at eye-level so as to force a realization of the human face of the Holocaust. This pictorial narration of the human face of the holocaust is punctured throughout by large, striking photographs which illustrate the ‘other side’ of the Holocaust : the Nazi state machinery, soldiers, rallies and propaganda. These large photographs dominate their allocated exhibition space, and their very size represents a psychical metaphor for the sheer dominance and power of the Nazi regime. Continue reading
The Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents visitors with a carefully designed, poignantly illustrated narrative of the most fatal genocide in human history. Its prominent location, alongside the Mall in Washington D.C, reflects its position as the official national recognition of and tribute to those who died in the Holocaust. Furthermore, its proximity to the nations leading commemorative monuments and political institutions conveys an implicit message that Holocaust has become enshrined as a part of the national memory forever, lending both a permanence and a prominence to memory of the Holocaust that would seek to defy any historical reinterpretation over the passage of time.