Ep. 43: Geographies of the Holocaust with Anne Kelly Knowles and Tim Cole

Ultimately, the story of the Holocaust is one centered in places:  where something happened, where someone was from, where someone wanted to go.  In this episode, I talked with two scholars about the role of geography in the Holocaust but also about how we use geographical approaches and methodologies to ask (and answer new important historical questions. 

Anne Kelly Knowles is the McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine.

Tim Cole is a professor of social history at the University of Bristol.

Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Paul Jaskot. Geographies of the Holocaust (2014)

Cole, Tim. Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (2003)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.968)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today I'm really excited. I have two guests to talk about a really interesting development change in our way of thinking about the Holocaust, which is what the sort of academics call the spatial turn. But really it's thinking about geography and how geographies of the Holocaust, ideas of space and place.

can tell us something new and different or inform our understanding of this event. And I couldn't think of two better people to talk about this than Tim Coles and Anne Kelly Knowles, who are giants in the field of this particular approach, as well as Holocaust scholars in their own right. Tim and Anne, thanks so much for coming on.

Tim (00:50.638)
It's pleasure. Good to see you.

Anne Knowles (00:52.316)
Really glad to be here. Thanks, Whiteman.

Waitman Beorn (00:55.333)
so can you, can you both start really quickly by just telling us how you got interested or how you got involved in, in learning about the Holocaust and, and, and in studying the Holocaust from your disciplinary perspectives.

Anne Knowles (01:09.444)
I think Tim should go first because he started chronologically before I did.

Tim (01:15.182)
So I got interested in the Holocaust as an undergraduate student. So partly through great teachers, which I think is often the case, isn't it? That great teachers can really spark your imagination. And so I had a few teachers who just got me interested in a guy called George Mosse, who some of you might know of. He's a historian who worked on Nazi Germany and he was a visiting professor at my university for a semester.

his classes were extraordinary. Like he's one of those guys where there was a small group of us for the first lecture. And by the end, it was standing room only because he was so compelling in telling a story of, of the Nazi state. And then I also had a, a supervisor, Paul Abrams, who'd written a book about, written a thesis about, Vichy France. And so he really helped me think a bit about like what was happening at a kind of national level in collaborator states.

And so in a sense, the two of them came together. think that the thing that I really wanted to get research was about the nature of collaborator states. And in particular, I was attracted to Hungary and Budapest. And a lot of that, I think, is because I was like part of that 1989 generation. So I was an undergraduate student at the time when the Berlin Wall fell came down in 1989. And so I was one of that kind of bunch of Western Europeans and Americans that were kind of like hopelessly drawn to Prague and Budapest in the.

late 1980s and early 1990s. And so I was really drawn to think about Hungary. And this is where a third teacher comes in. So I did history as an undergraduate, but my best mate, Matthew, did geography. And I was incredibly jealous of geographers because they went on field trips and all historians did was hang out in libraries and archives. And my friend, Matthew, went to Budapest with a guy called Graham Smith, a political geographer.

Waitman Beorn (02:58.537)
You

Tim (03:09.836)
And I was like jealous as anything of this trip to Budapest. Matthew came back and he said, Tim, you're in the Holocaust. You should do something about the Budapest ghetto with Graham. And so long story short, I ended up switching from history to geography and did a PhD in geography with Graham Smith on the spatiality of the Budapest ghetto. And in the sense, I've been kind of stuck with that topic ever since. So this is like late eighties, early nineties. A lot of it was happenstance. It was like

three people I met who really inspired me and it was a bit of jealousy for a geography undergraduate and the world of field trips.

Waitman Beorn (03:46.321)
And so the learning point here for everyone listening, if you're an historian, is more field trips to stop the hemorrhaging of students from history to geography. And tell us more.

Anne Knowles (03:58.162)
Well, first, amen to field trips. I don't know how anyone can study anything in history without going to where it happened. My story about getting interested, really consumed by the Holocaust in a way, started with a phone call in about 2004, was it, Tim? When Robert Ehrenreich at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Tim (04:21.91)
Yeah, I think so.

Anne Knowles (04:28.11)
was interested in getting a few geographers involved, possibly, with what became one of their summer two-week-long research seminars, bringing scholars from different disciplines together to exchange their work and sort of learn from each other. And that became the group that Tim and I helped organize with Alberto Giordano and some of our favorite people.

and that you, Waitman, were the rookie in because Chris Browning said, hey, Waitman, there's this interesting thing happening. And he said to us, hey, there's this interesting grad student. Why don't you involve him? The two weeks that we spent together in one of the basement classrooms of the Holocaust Museum completely changed my career and in some ways changed my life. Before then,

Waitman Beorn (04:58.856)
Anyways.

Anne Knowles (05:21.714)
So by this point, I was already more than 16 years into my career as an historical geographer. I'd studied the immigration of Welsh farmers to the United States. I'd written a book about that and a book about the US iron industry. I was an American historical geographer. But when I got that phone call, the question that the man at the end of the line, Michael Haley Goldman at the museum asked me,

was, you think GIS might be useful for studying the Holocaust? And I felt electricity zap down my spine because although I'd never studied the Holocaust, I hadn't even read Anne Frank's diary. That question immediately brought a million ideas to my mind. And I said, God, yes. And the reason that was so exciting for me was that I'd spent much of those 16 years

developing ways of using GIS to study the past. It had been the backbone of both my studies of immigration and industrialization. And the reason it was so exciting for thinking about the Holocaust is that, of course, the Holocaust was made up of thousands of places. And how do you organize that material? How do you make sense of such a complex phenomenon unfolding over space and changing Europe? Well, yeah, you put GIS at the center of that.

So that was my entree.

Waitman Beorn (06:50.065)
And I should jump in, I should jump in really quickly just to note for our listeners that GIS is a, it's a kind of a software suite. it's also a, an area of study as well, geographic information sciences. but when we, when we say we're GIS, just kind of imagine a super powerful mapping program that lets you do, put in all kinds of information along with location and you can animate it over time and these kinds of things.

Anne Knowles (07:03.687)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (07:19.56)
Anyway, sorry, I'll be quiet and go ahead.

Anne Knowles (07:21.914)
No, yeah, that's it, Waitman, exactly. GIS is tailor-built for handling complexity and bringing together all kinds of diverse information with the commonality being location. So if you know a lot about a camp or a ghetto or a country and you want to see how those different factors related to one another, GIS is a great way to go. And I happen to have a lot of experience with that, which was

The one thing I brought to an incredibly diverse table that included feminist historian Simone Gagliotti, I mean, just an incredible array. And maybe we should talk about that group because in many ways we continue to work together. And it's been formative in my thinking about how to do geographies of the Holocaust. But each of us continues to follow a distinctive path.

Waitman Beorn (08:19.432)
Well, and I should also mention, you know, this podcast isn't about me, but it was, I had applied to do something. I don't know what it was, but it had fallen through. was a graduate student at the time. And Chris said, there's this geography group at the Holocaust museum who want to talk about the Holocaust and geography. And I was, I was completely ignorant of, of what geography.

did as a discipline, and we'll talk about that in a minute. And I was like, sure, sounds good. As a grad student, the ability to go work at the museum with smart people was amazing. But beyond that, I really had no idea, literally no idea what I was getting into. And I will say also that that two weeks is still...

there are still sort of ripples and echoes of that two weeks in my own work and the things that I'm doing that I have done, the ways that I think about the past, both in terms of sort of analysis, but also in terms of how to do the analysis. The digital project that I'm working on now is in some ways a result of that. And so yeah, that two week was a really important period, I think, and it exposed me to a lot of folks that I still work with and...

I think it also speaks really loudly to the importance of interdisciplinary, collaboration because, know, I literally had no idea of most of the things in terms of geographic principles and, and methodologies. I just didn't have any idea they existed. and then I went there and I'm like, you know, my gosh, you know, Anne had, Anne had the reverse sort of.

You know, knows a lot about the things, but not a lot about the history. I had the, I don't know. know a decent amount about the history, but not a lot about the methodology. So then I was like, well, how can I apply the methodology to everything? which I thought was really, really important. So yeah. and that was, that was a critical moment.

Anne Knowles (10:25.554)
Tim mentioned teachers, and I don't think I've ever quite told you, Tim, that you were my biggest teacher. In some ways, even more than Paul Jaskot, who I ended up collaborating with the most, but you brought the mesh of geographic thinking, spatial awareness, and knowledge of the Holocaust and became the center that the rest of us were plugging into.

And you also had us all read a piece that continues to resonate for me and shape my thinking, Andrew Charlesworth's The Topography of Genocide, a simple, beautifully written, fairly short essay that explains that the Holocaust happened in ordinary landscapes in really an uncountable number of ordinary places. And I continued to try to work that out in my own scholarship.

Tim (11:23.234)
Yeah, I think it's an amazing essay that one isn't it by Charlesworth. It's such a brilliant essay. And I think you know, in a sense, I think Andy Charlesworth really was the pioneer of this Geographies of the Holocaust. So he wrote a couple of articles in Journal of Historical Geography in the early 90s. I never wrote a book but wrote a series of really penetrating essays that you know, I always felt like I was riffing off Andy Charlesworth in the work that I did. And it was really nice. He was the external examiner for my PhD. So it was really lovely to get his

feedback on that PhD project. So I think he, you know, is a really significant player in many ways that I kind of felt like I was on the, on, on, on his coattails, you know, kind of hanging on his coattails. And it's really nice to hear that you think of that, cause I still, it's still assigned that essay to my students. Like it's a dated essay in some ways, but I think it's still one of the really important significant pioneering works. It's in an editor collection by Dan Stone. And it's just a terrific essay. It's one of those things that just makes your mind pop, doesn't it? Cause it's so.

Anne Knowles (12:20.676)
hehe

Tim (12:21.314)
provocative and wide ranging.

Anne Knowles (12:23.378)
And one of the things I, sorry, I was just going to say, wait a minute, this may get us into what is geography. One of the things I particularly appreciate about that little essay is its attention to physical geography, to soil, to sand, to forests, to weather, and lines of sight. And I think the physical landscape is a huge part of what I don't, I don't really like the term, the spatial turn. Wait a minute.

Waitman Beorn (12:23.97)
And so maybe.

Go ahead.

Anne Knowles (12:52.966)
Because that sounds quite abstract and theoretical, I think an awful lot of what's going on is a return to the material, including the material circumstances of the Holocaust that Charles Wirth pointed me to.

Waitman Beorn (12:56.412)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (13:06.16)
That's a great point. mean, I think the spatial turn is a historical riff off the cultural turn, know, so that's a whole like, know, historians like to sort of have inside jokes with each other. And I feel like that's one of them. Maybe we should also, you mentioned this and it was one of the questions that I had as sort of a lead into this conversation, particularly for our audience who may not really know what is geography as a scholarly discipline? Because I suspect that

that most people, when they think of geography, they think of something very basic and elementary, you know, about learning where things are on a map, which is absolutely not what the discipline of geography is all about. So can you talk a little about sort of what geographers do? Because it's a really rich sort of amazingly varied group of people.

Anne Knowles (13:59.09)
I have two sentences to start. I thought about this one, Waitman. I've defined geography to students over and over in my career, but here's where I land now. Geography is our existence in the world, physically, and how we perceive and imagine it. It is also the study of those things. And geography is how creatures and physical phenomena have shaped the landscape.

and left telling traces of their actions.

That's my starting bid.

Tim (14:37.804)
And maybe just to kind of to riff off that to sort of continue that I think one thing that really struck me, you know, leaving undergraduate study in history and entering into a geography department in the nineties was just how extraordinarily diverse the kinds of things geographers do as a result of the things that Anne's just said. Because if you take those sentences around in a sense that is everything, isn't it? It's kind of everything.

that happens in the world in a sense has a geography to it. That it's about interactions of humans and environments and animals and environments about the change of environments over time. And I think that was really insightful for me was I kind of came into a geography department and I felt like, wow, this is, this is like interdisciplinary happening. You know, like I had PhD student colleagues who were doing work on the cusp of physics and chemistry within

more physical geography aspects of the department and I had others who were doing work on the cusp of ethnography or anthropology or sociology or myself, you know, on the cusp of history and I found that an incredibly exciting thing that I felt like, wow, there's this extraordinary diversity that's possible with the geography. I suppose the thing that kind of kept held us together was that attention to asking spatial questions. So asking maybe a set of questions that historians don't always immediately ask.

I think as a historian, wait a minute, think often we ask, like, when did it happen? And I guess for me as a geographer, was thinking, actually, where did it happen? And like, what else is happening around it? Like, what's the nature of the relationships? And I think Anne's thing about relationships is really critical, that the relationships between objects in space or in place, and those objects might be human objects, or they might be physical or built objects or natural, you know, natural objects, like there's a sense of that interaction.

And I found moving to a geography department as a PhD student hugely inspiring. It really opened my eyes, I think, to a different way of thinking about history and about the world.

Waitman Beorn (16:44.265)
And I think this is something that I can speak to personally because I think you're right. mean, maybe less historians are concerned about when something happened, but more concerned about what happened. And place is often sort of an abstract, not abstract in a literal sense, but just it's okay. It happened in Berlin. It happened in Germany. happened. it's not given as a terrible way to phrase it, but it's not given any agency.

Anne Knowles (17:05.689)
It's unexamined.

Waitman Beorn (17:13.608)
Of place doesn't have agency. It's not biased, but it isn't impartial either. Because the geography, whether it's the valley or the city or the nation, does impact how things happen. Not because it has an interest in it, but because it just, is. And so I think that that's one of the things that, go ahead, Ann.

Anne Knowles (17:35.218)
Another difference, there's a tired adage that people say history is about time, geography is about place or space. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. A difference that I've become more aware of is a difference in sensitivities and where people look for causation. And historians, think, are extremely sensitive.

to contingency, what were the contingent circumstances, though, as we've said, usually excluding the contingencies of place. Geographers tend to be very sensitive to scale. At what scale did things happen? At what scale were decisions made? And this has direct bearing on the kinds of geographical work that's going on in Holocaust scholarship now, that looking at the scale of policy,

the scale of the nation or power brokers produces a very different kind of history than looking at the scale of a village or a region. And being able to think in that kind of accordion way of looking up and down and sideways as well is part of the richness of geography as well as everything that Tim has said.

Waitman Beorn (18:59.497)
And this is one of the reasons that I think geography resonated with me so much because I've all, I mean, I think the one area in history where it's very clear methodologically that these things are connected is those of us that do what's called micro histories, which is looking at very detailed studies of smaller places or smaller events, and then trying to see to the extent to which we can extrapolate those findings out to the larger, to draw large conclusions. And that is one of the

only sort of really explicit areas methodologically in history that has a spatial scale sort of thing to it, right? Everybody else's social history, economic history, but when you're doing a micro history, you are by definition doing precisely all those things that you talked about that geographers do in a certain sense, which is, you know, look at things very, very tightly, but also grounded literally in sort of where they are.

I know that I hadn't thought about that until you mentioned it, but that is another one of the reasons why I think geography appeals to me so much as sort of a discipline as an approach.

Tim (20:06.126)
I think you're right that, I mean, think historians, sometimes they, in a sense, historians adopt a scale of, or a resolution of analysis by default, but I think often in a kind of unthinking, uncritical way. So I'm not necessarily thinking like Ad said about that sense of almost nestings of scale. So that actually, if you think about the Holocaust, the Holocaust is something that happens both at the global scale. know, think about refugees, Jewish refugees leaving Europe, going to Shanghai.

And as well as at every scale in between continental, national, regional, local, all the way down to the scale of like an individual gendered body. And I think as historians, I think we tend to not really think about that so much. Like we don't think so much about where this thing happened. We don't think about the sense of the resolution or scale of analysis. And I think that's one thing that geography, you know, has really introduced to me. One of our dear colleagues, Alberto Giordano, he always talks about scale, doesn't he Anne?

Anne Knowles (21:02.726)
You want some?

Tim (21:03.586)
the thing he stresses, and I think he rightly stresses that, that actually at different scales of analysis, you uncover in the sense different stories and what's the nature of the relationship between those. And I think Paul Jascott's done some really interesting work there. He's sort of taken Sure Friedlander's idea of integrated history and talked more about relational history. And Paul has really been thinking there about like, how do you connect the scale or resolution of the individual to the scale of the system?

of the entire, say, concentration camp system or slave labor system. And I think those, to me, feel like profoundly geographical questions. Like, I don't think Paul would necessarily have asked that question without being exposed maybe to Alberto's insistence, you know, on the importance of scale. Maybe just one other thing. I don't know what you think, Anne, but one thing I reflected on when I moved into a geography department for the PhD was I thought I got a sense that geographers think visually or that like mapping in its very broadest sense.

is a really critical part of a geographer's toolkit. And that was so new to me. Like it's rare for historians to kind of doodle. And then I sort of found myself, you know, in some ways as I found myself thinking about spatial concepts, I really felt that I started to draw and sometimes I draw maps, what are more traditionally maps. But other times I draw kind of, I guess, spatial diagrams, which we're trying to think things through using a visual methodology. And to me, that was a really, you know, I joked about

field work and you picked up on that and you know I think field work is critical like seeing the places we write about but I also started to think maybe think more visually as a part of my methodology I don't know what your reflections are but I felt like there was something about geography that really introduced a new aspect or element of research process to me.

Anne Knowles (22:46.418)
I agree completely. And it is fundamental. Making maps stimulates the part of the brain that does spatial thinking. It stimulates and heightens spatial awareness. It makes one more prone, I would say, more able to see spatial relationships in the physical world and to imagine them as part, a fundamental part of the structure.

of historical processes. So I think the training in geography, which is almost unique of map making, though that has fallen out with the adoption of computer-based GIS systems, which often don't get really to cartographic design. But anyway, people who make maps tend to be able to think spatially much, much better. And I find that with my students that even teaching people how to make maps with

tissue with tracing paper on a light table and colored pencils, which I still do, I've done it for 30 years, stimulates certain minds in a way that then becomes creative and generative. yes, spatial diagrams, Tim, for capturing what you see in your mind as a spatial process and relationships. The other thing that mapping does, and this is where maybe, Waitman, we can get into building data sets is important.

The third big facet of geographic thinking, I think, is looking for differences. How do events and places differ over space? That is the other key thing that mapping allows you to see, which is often completely invisible unless you map it. So where was the battlefront in relationship to the formation of ghettos? You can talk about that. You might be able to

describe it in a rich historical way for one region, you couldn't possibly describe it well in words for all of Eastern Europe, but with maps you can. So that's another dimension of what mapping and geographic thinking can bring to history that I think is endlessly exciting. You can see the invisible.

Waitman Beorn (25:06.962)
Yeah, and of course, and I make this pitch when I talk to students about digital humanities as well, you know, that, and I think you could say the same thing with thinking spatially with geography is that it can both answer questions that you may have had going in, but the process of using it also can generate new questions that you may not have even thought were questions to ask. And then you see the data visualized in a certain way.

where you have a challenge with how you manipulate the data. And then you begin to think, gosh, I hadn't even thought about this other question, which actually then could take on a greater importance in the question that you sort of came to the project with in the first place.

Anne Knowles (25:50.588)
Tim, I wonder if, I think your work with Alberto on Budapest is endlessly interesting in revealing the kind of things I'm talking about at the scale of a city. Could you tell us some of what you're up to now or the parts of your work with Alberto that have meant the most to you?

Tim (26:11.628)
Yeah, think one thing I think that's been interesting in working with Alberto is that I think it's been a kind of dance between the archival sources and the possibilities that GIS affords to bring multiple layers of data together. And one thing that we did early on, Alberto said to me,

You know, I said to a bit, okay, I said, but I want to map ghettoization in Budapest, which is this unusual dispersed form of ghettoization. So it's spread in 1944 throughout like about 2000 apartment buildings across the city. And we had the addresses. So we have some great geographical data to work with. And I said to a bit, I really want to map this. And he said, we need the street layer. Like we need to actually think about the street layer. And I was like, why do we need to think about the street layer? Because surely we can just put

them as dots on the map. And actually what was fascinating, I think, was that once we had a street layer, we could start to think about actually distance as a kind of physical entity. So rather than just distance being something that appears in the abstract, distance is actually about how long does it take me to walk from this apartment building to that apartment building or from this apartment building.

to that building where I want to get hold of protective paperwork offered by the Swedish legation in Budapest, for example, in 1944. And so there, think Alberto kind of prompted me to do something that Anne talked about, which is this the kind of idea of materiality of the sense of the world. know, the geography of the city isn't just an abstract geography, which is connected by points in the map, but is actually a geography that has physical streets.

which can be walked upon that might be hilly or flat and may have a whole set of buildings around them or be more open where you may feel more enclosed or more open or more vulnerable. And so he really helped me, think, to think about that. And I think that really got me asking a whole new set of questions. So I went in saying, let's map the disperse ghetto. Alberto said, let's put in the layer of the street network. And then suddenly you start to think like,

Tim (28:32.84)
wow, like some of these apartment buildings are like a long way from each other. If you start mapping out walking distances, once you've got a street layer and like, what does that mean? Does that mean that actually the ghetto here in Budapest doesn't bring Jews together, but separates them out? And like which Jews are separated out from other Jews and what's the nature of that? And what are the implications of that for Jews living in the city? And then ultimately, one of the other pieces of work we went on to do with that was to start really interrogating

actually, how did Jews access protective paperwork? Like if you lived a long way away from the legation building, and I should just add at this point that there's a curfew, so there's only a few hours a day that you're allowed to walk on the streets of the city if you're Jewish in Budapest in 1944. Hence, know, physical distance really mattered. We started to look at like another set of documents, which was a list of Jews that were given protective paperwork by the Swedish government, where we also had geographical information. So we had addresses, pre-war addresses.

Anne Knowles (29:23.794)
you

Tim (29:31.98)
And so we could suddenly start to throw that into the picture and think, like, was there a real advantage to living next door to the embassy building? Like if you lived next door to the embassy building, were you more likely to get protective paperwork? And you could almost imagine, you know, a series of concentric circles spilling out from that so that the Jews that live far furthest away don't get the paperwork. And what was fascinating is we started to map this out was we found this very odd pattern, which is that in the area where Jews live closest to the legation building,

they weren't getting paperwork in the same kinds of numbers as Jews that were living far, far away, much more distant from the legation building. And so then we had to ask a new set of geographical questions. And Alberta said, the thing we need to do now is we need to throw census data into this. So we need to add another layer to our mapping, which is to try and map in census data. And there's some amazing census data from Budapest from the 1930s.

which we could start to bring in, which is to start to think about actually what's the nature of these neighborhoods? Like how big are these homes? And do they have central heating? And do they have lifts, elevators? Do they have indoor plumbing? Like what's the socioeconomic status of these homes? Like how wealthy are Jews who are living in this part of the city compared to that part of the city? And that's where we started to see that another geography was playing out, which was a geography of socioeconomic power that actually

the Jews that were receiving protective paperwork were more likely to be those Jews living in the wealthier parts of the city, physically distant from the legation building, rather than the poorer parts of the city, physically proximate to the legation building. And I think that's just an example where in a sense we started with one layer of the map and then added a second layer of the map that prompted a new set of questions about physical distance and proximity.

where we then had to add a new layer of the map as the pattern didn't seem to be one about physical distance, which was to start to map out the city as a socioeconomic space and then to come to a new set of conclusions. And I think that to me is really interesting about layers of mapping or geography is that geography in a sense is about all of those spatial relationships, isn't it? Is it spatial relationships are ones that have a kind of physical topographical relationship to them, but they also have other relationships. You know, in some ways we're

Tim (31:47.564)
The three of us are quite distant at the moment physically, but this platform brings us together, but we've actually worked together and we have a kind of set of relationships as scholars who work together. Topologically, we're close, even if topographically, physically, we're distant. And I think that's one thing that I've been really interested in the work with Alberto is trying to think about distance and proximity in multiple ways and to think about the kind of multiple geographies of the experience of being Jewish in Budapest in 1944.

Waitman Beorn (32:17.672)
I mean, it seems like that often what happens in the process that you described him is we start by asking sort of how questions. And then as we're trying to solve the how questions, they generate why questions. And so that's another place I think where the history historians I think like to ask a lot of why questions. mean, geographers do too. But I think it's a place where they also come together, you know, because you.

you've started to visualize big data in this case, and you've identified differences, which Anne talked about a minute ago. And then, you know, I think the synergy area is that historians and geographers both want to know why. You know, after we see these patterns or see these things that are often unexpected or unexpected in the sense of we never would have thought we could see them because it's so big data that we can't wrap our face around it.

Anne Knowles (32:47.196)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (33:12.55)
then we ask why, then we're doing the simultaneous work of geography and history at the same time.

Anne Knowles (33:18.162)
Definitely. There's something that your comments, Tim, brought to mind. I'm not sure if you would agree with this, but I think the process that Waitman just also described for historians tends to be a little more formulaic. You have a question. You have an historical question. You find an archive or a series of archives where you're fairly confident

papers will help you answer that question. You go to the archives, you work through them. You may not find the answer you expected, but there's a process there. I think in historical geography that you and I are talking about today, one needs a little more trust in the process that you don't know what you're going to find. You really don't. And particularly if you...

are mapping something that's complicated that's never been mapped before. You don't know what the patterns are gonna be. You don't know what the mapping is going to reveal to you. And so it takes a willingness to take risks, I think, which historians are not so inclined to do, but people drawn to geography are. And there's a quality, and I find in many geographers or people who do geographical work, of lateral thinking, of seeing connections between things. We've already talked.

a lot about relationships. And that too can take you to surprising places. And if you're willing to take those little jumps or to wait until the data speak to you, then great stuff can happen. Would you agree with that?

Tim (34:57.77)
Yeah, no, I think I think you put that really well, because I think you're absolutely right that it feels like it's more iterative. It feels a bit it's a bit more seats of the of your pants at certain times, isn't it? Because it's kind of feels like risky. And I think there is a strong sense of the unexpected. And I think it was interesting in the earlier project we did, I think Paul and I both had moments like that, didn't we? Where Paul Jascot, with the work that you guys did on mapping the SS camp system.

Anne Knowles (35:04.582)
Yes.

Tim (35:27.566)
or mapping the building archive of Auschwitz. Paul had moments where he was like, my gosh, I now need to ask a new set of questions. And I think I've had the same with the work with Alberto. And I think as a historian, some of the work I've done is more traditional historical work. There are times when I go into an archive and it tells me something that I'm not expecting and I have to reframe my questions. But I think there is something distinctive about mapping and in particular mapping big data.

that means that sometimes you're just literally thrown, like you have to jump. And I think lateral thinking is a really good way of thinking about that, that you think laterally and you suddenly start asking a whole new set of questions.

Waitman Beorn (36:07.4)
I mean, think that's been my experience as well. mean, I think oftentimes historians go into an archive with a general sense of kind of what might be there. And occasionally you get the smoking gun of something crazy that you hadn't expected, but most of the time...

You have a general sense of these are the kinds of things I'm going to find. I feel like having listened to both of you reflect on this just now, historians actually are more comfortable just kind of like tweaking their questions to fit the archives. so like, I mean, you'll hear this with, with graduate students, other people saying like, I wanted to look at this, but then I went in the archives and I couldn't really look at that because the documents didn't really support that. You know, which is, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but.

It also means that you've left the question that you really wanted to, to explore. Whereas I think if you're saying, you know, if your question begins with how can I map the experience of X group of people, then you don't need to change the question in the same way, because you're going to get information. And then your question becomes wide in the context of mapping the experience of those group of people. Why is this a thing? Why is that a thing? so it's a different.

different relationship with the sources as well, where you're sort of not as driven by the initial iteration of the source. You're in fact creating a new source, which is the mapping of the visualization of the data set that you've started with.

Anne Knowles (37:38.332)
Hmm.

Anne Knowles (37:42.204)
Yeah, I think that relates to Tim's work with Alberto. And since you mentioned Paul Jaskat, Tim, we actually have a name in geography for what Paul experienced and maybe you too, the eureka moment when a map shows you something and say, my God, I had no idea. So Paul's eureka moment, at least the first one, came when he and I were working on

with his deep knowledge of the Auschwitz construction archive out of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. And we decided that it might be useful, we should have a base map of Auschwitz one and two, the first camp and then Birkenau, which became the giant of the whole SS camp system and was infamous for.

gas chambers and crematoria and hundreds of thousands and eventually more than a million people cycling through for labor and so on. So we had a very talented student I was working with at Middlebury College in Vermont, Chester Harvey, who was able to translate the architectural drawings plans into a GIS of building footprints and then Paul

identified the function, really the identity of each of those buildings. I remember him saying, so what am I supposed to do? And I said, get a crayon and write on the plan. This is the potato shed. And so he did that for the whole landscape. And then he had Chester add to that data set the date of construction for buildings from the building plans.

and those had never been put together before. We have seen in every atlas of the Holocaust I've ever seen the buildings of Auschwitz-Birkenau and it looks so, okay, there they are. We know that plan. It's a grid and it's horrible. But because we had the dates of so many of those buildings, Chester was able to make a little animation which showed the construction in time.

Anne Knowles (39:59.824)
And the first time Paul saw that, I'm getting the chills again now, he said, my God, I didn't realize they're building a few months in advance of the transport of Hungarian Jews. The contingency was there in the plans. And that changed his whole perception of that enormous site. He began to see it as a huge construction site. And that led to examining other parts of Auschwitz. When were they built? What was planned?

and build what was planned and not built? Well, guess what? The ideal city that was going to be part of Auschwitz I was not built. Instead of the grand pavilion for the commandant, additional guards barracks were built, again, in anticipation of the transport, the shipment of over 400,000 Jews from Hungary. So that was a really exciting moment for both of us because the mapping did provide

answers and raised a whole new set of questions about the role of construction in the Holocaust.

Tim (41:06.508)
And I think it's an interesting example of that one, isn't it? Because in some ways you could say, but Paul could have seen that working through the blueprints of the archive. But I think there is something about mapping visualization that helps us to see things that are really difficult. You know, when you're in an archive, wait a minute, you're like leafing through, you know, document after document after document. Like I think sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees that you, you can't necessarily see that really big picture. You don't necessarily locate.

that building's built on that date. And that's interesting. This plan is from a few years later. Like I think until you piece it together. And I think that's the thing that I think is interesting about the work that we've all been doing and is that sense of piecing things together of that kind of bringing together multiple data sets, which are essentially created from archival documents. kind of almost like visualizing archives and bringing multiple archives together that there's something that you see, you start to see.

Anne Knowles (41:55.836)
Yes.

Tim (42:03.63)
patterns that become, you just have to then start to try and explain, don't you? And I think that is a different way of working. Like it feels like kind of a maybe more bottom up sort of way of working, you know, start with the archive and then kind of move out from that, visualize it and try and make sense of it.

Anne Knowles (42:07.345)
Okay.

Anne Knowles (42:13.052)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (42:18.856)
I mean, this is the thing that if I can jump in real quick, I guess I can, where it's my podcast, right? But I think it's like the clearest, it's the clearest example, now that I think about it, of sort of the impact that this work has had on me. And it's also what I always bring up talking to students. So it hovers listing if you're an undergraduate or a graduate student or whatever who thinks that this is inaccessible to me, I can't do these sorts of things, they're too difficult.

Tim (42:26.062)
you

Anne Knowles (42:26.65)
Hahaha

Waitman Beorn (42:48.009)
Most of, most of our work in this sense starts in a lot of ways with a spreadsheet of just of data that has been collated in and organized in proper columns and these kinds of things. And I did this when I doing the Inovskaya book, because I was working with a lot of sources that were, that included a brief biography, for example, The Perpetrators. And so I literally made a spreadsheet, two spreadsheets of, of, uh,

the individuals where they were at a certain period of time, beginning and end and what they were doing for the, for the SS men at Yanovska. And that led to two things that were really, really important. One was, when I mapped that again, a very basic map, I noticed that there was this cohort of men that all live within 60 miles of each other in what is now Yugoslavia who became SS men together.

And then I, I, I, I mapped the whole, the whole system as a social network. And I could see where these guys were overlapping, that they had served together in places where they were small enough and specific enough that they probably ran into each other. you know, two of them who worked in the same Siemens factory, you know, before the war. And so I bring that up as an example, because there's a whole chapter of my book that would not have existed.

had I not thought just to mark down where these people were from and kind of keep track of it, because then I had to explain what's the significance of this. Because it's not something that really has been done in Holocaust studies a lot. It's often done survivor networks, networks of survivors after the war, these kinds of things. But what does it mean that you have a lot of these people having served in the same places either at the same time or before or after? It's a great example of

what happens when you take data that as Tim just mentioned, I would never have picked up on that by going through the documents because it would have been, I would have been reading about this guy and then I turn the page, I'm reading about that guy, turn the page, I'm reading about that guy. I never would have connected all these things together. just, my brain, I think most of our brains don't function that way, but just taking one intermediate step of manipulating the data.

Waitman Beorn (45:15.89)
from one form to another, then opens up a whole nother door of things to ask and modes of analysis.

Anne Knowles (45:21.682)
Well, something else you mentioned, Waitman, is even before the step of building a data set or thinking about how you might analyze it is just recording place in any form of notes that you're taking. And maybe that'll become a database. Maybe it won't. But I have talked to so many historians who do not note where

the events they're studying took place into the level of detail that's provided in the archive. And the first time this just hit me between the eyes was when I came back, my first job was in Wales and I came back to the US, a job at a small liberal arts college, Wellesley College for a couple of years. And there was a wonderful sociologist I met there named Sally Mary who studied sexual violence in Hawaii. Really interesting.

And she was explaining her work to me. And I said, have you made a map? Well, no. Have you noted down where those events took place? No, gee, you I never thought of that. And I've talked to so many historians who just don't do that. And if you don't do that, you can't think spatially about your work. So my word of advice to anyone who

is thinking they'd like to work spatially, they want to make maps, try to gear down to the simplest level first. Record place in your data, in your notes, and then you'll begin to get ideas maybe about how you might want to map it. Maybe you can get some help with that, but don't leap to, I want to make a map because that's cool and that's what people are doing today. No, pay attention to place and space.

and it will unfold more naturally. And then it will also arise, your ideas about mapping will arise in relationship to your research questions. And that's what makes mapping valuable. It's not like it's, you must do it because it's cool. No, do it because it'll help you answer your research questions and along the way will probably change.

Waitman Beorn (47:37.661)
I mean, that was a big aha moment for me. when we were, and again, I don't mean for our audience to keep going back to this, this two weeks, but it is really important. But one of the, the aha moments for me in the, in that experience was that maps don't have to be the final end product. Maps can just be the tool.

to think about something, you know, I think those of us who aren't geographers and are not as aware of what geographers do, we think, a map is something that goes in an Atlas or it goes on a wall. It's a final, it's the, it's the be all end all goal of what you're doing. but actually the map can be just a thing that you do and then you look at and then you write about, that you, that, answers a question for you. doesn't have to be.

the final goal, you're not sort of mapping the Northwest passage. You're just using the data to then ask more questions. And I think that that's another thing that geography does intentionally in a way that history writing, think is often just like the only intermediate process between the final step. It's like a rough draft and a final draft.

Anne Knowles (48:31.122)
You

Waitman Beorn (48:54.503)
whereas, know, there may be lots of maps, visualizations, doodles. I do it now too, Tim, you know, where I, I'll draw a spatial thing and that's never going to go anywhere except in my head. but it's vital to getting to my final product, which is an historian is usually a book that we can talk about, you know, if that needs to be the, the case anyway. But I mean, I think that that's a, that's another sort of element that I think is really critical in terms of process. And one of things that I've learned so much.

from geography is process. And, and also, and this is where the, what I want to pass it back to y'all. Cause another thing that I am now super, super, super sensitive to as an historian that I'm not sure historians are consciously or intentionally sensitive to is ambiguity. Um, and I, because this is my, this is my, now I'm like an ambiguity prophet, you know, evangelist, um, you know, because

Anne Knowles (49:26.29)
Hmm.

Anne Knowles (49:45.276)
Haha.

Waitman Beorn (49:53.501)
When you're drawing a map or something, tangible, you have to be sure of how sure you are. and that was not something that I thought about, but now that I do very much, which is, which is, you know, okay, how much do I know about this thing and how certain am I that I know it? Can, can y'all talk a little bit about that? Because I think it's really fascinating.

Anne Knowles (50:17.042)
I laughed when you said the word wait man, because as you know, I've spent like 25 years thinking about ambiguity and trying to understand the geographies of the Holocaust and particularly trying to map the Holocaust. You confront ambiguity all the time. I think of mapping now as a confrontation with what you do not know, as you said.

Waitman Beorn (50:21.832)
it.

Anne Knowles (50:43.782)
with the uncertainty of information, with the incompleteness of information, and writing history, as I did as an historical geographer too, even though I've always made maps, I worked in archives for my first two books and I wrote them by myself and I loved that. But there is a way in which writing history is so often anecdotal. You have...

Tim (51:00.43)
Okay.

Anne Knowles (51:12.07)
bits of information, you have really revealing stories, whether it's micro history or something at the national or continental or global scale. And you write what your sources allow you to write and you explain the interstices in a way that is logical and makes sense. And maybe you say, I'm not sure about this, but, but when you're making a map, if you do not know whether you can include this ghetto or that ghetto, or if you're making a time series,

When did a certain ghetto open? Well, the information is incredibly ambiguous in the sources. It could have been December 1st, 1942, or it could have been sometime in the winter. What do you do with that? So I find mapping the Holocaust an incredibly challenging intellectual exercise. And even if you develop protocols, as my research group has, for representing those kinds of temporal and spatial uncertainties,

It never goes away. And I love that. It keeps you humble. But I don't know, audiences struggle a little bit with this because they would, and other scholars do too. I've had historians tell me, come on, just tell me the story. And don't talk about the methodology. Don't talk about what you don't know. Tell me what you know. Well, what I don't know is now part of what I know. How do you two feel about that?

Tim (52:38.828)
Yeah. And I think, I think that's one thing that's really struck me and working more within digital humanities methods, you know, since our two week workshop and just working with you and, Alberto in particular is that I think once you get, know, underlying a GIS map is a database. And once you start to create a database, then you encounter quickly ambiguity.

as you work with historical archives and sources. And I think it foregrounds it in a way that I don't think we normally foreground it just if you're working as a historian. I think historians would be the first to say that archives have gaps and that it's very fragmentary. And I've long been interested in that. I've long been interested in that sense of the fragmentary nature of the archive.

But I think a database really forces that because you've got to decide, like, does it go in this column or that column? Or what do I do about the fact that I don't have this? There's something missing. And I don't think that is something that as historians, we generally, we're not confronted with that all the time. We kind of slip through that a little bit. and I think it's really, I think it's, it's almost ironic because I think often people assume the digital humanities,

like is kind of doesn't deal with fuzz or, or gaps or yeah. Whereas actually I think it really brings it to the fore, doesn't it? Like, think if any, if anyone, if you've ever tried to create a database, you know that you're grappling with fuzz and ambiguity and gaps all the time. And you're really having to think that through. And I, think there's something about the discipline of that, maybe the discipline of database construction that I

Anne Knowles (54:04.407)
do they?

Anne Knowles (54:09.435)
Yes.

Tim (54:27.882)
I think I bring into work when I'm not using databases as well, that it's made me think a certain way about archives and sources that I think has been really helpful. And I think you're right, Anne, about like Alberto, you you mentioned the word anecdotes and Alberto often uses that phrase with me. know, Alberto is probably the most, I guess, sciency of all of our geographers and know, Alberto is a GIA scientist. And I'll sometimes write something and he'll say,

Waitman Beorn (54:31.175)
Yep.

Anne Knowles (54:31.356)
Hmm.

Tim (54:55.692)
Tim, that's very nice, you know, when we write together, but that's just an anecdote. And I think he does make me think really hard about actually those of us, maybe when we're writing as historians, like what are the claims we're making for this particular story that we're telling from this particular document? And are we really grappling with ambiguity and absence and fragmentation? And I think to me,

working with people like yourself, Adam, with Alberta, that's really forced me to be much more maybe rigorous, actually, in the way that I work with archives and sources.

Anne Knowles (55:28.538)
interesting. I think there's a related sorry

Waitman Beorn (55:31.304)
I think it's interesting that, sorry, I think it's interesting that as Tim sort of highlighted a little bit that, you know, historians will be the first talk about the silence in the archive. You know, that certain people's voices are not heard. Certain genders' voices are not heard. know, it's often an official perspective and that kind of stuff. And we often, think they had that historians often just take that as a given. But the step that y'all are talking about,

is the next step, is how is that impacting the conclusions that I'm drawing? And they are often a little bit less, at least explicit about how that's impacting, which is more of that what if, know, what if I had, you know, what sources would I need that would change the way that I'm thinking about things? And I think that's another place where this idea of

of ambiguity becomes explicit when you have to basically, it's like a toggle switch. know, obviously we have ways around that, but you know, it's, as you point out the great example of dates, know, like spring of 30 spring of 42, well, what is, what is spring? What does that mean? You know? Um, and how do I, how do I figure out a way to include that data point while also being clear that I don't know the same, the same amount of specificity about that data point.

Anne Knowles (56:53.34)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (56:56.84)
that I do about this other one here where the person says it was December 16th, 1942, right? mean, this is, think.

Anne Knowles (57:01.852)
There's so many things to draw from this. One thing that occurs to me is how important it can be as a teacher to take students behind the curtain and help them see, have them build a little data set that's from messy historical data. And they confront these problems right away. And it really sinks in. And that's one of the most effective steps I've found.

for developing critical consciousness of historical sources. Trying to do the translation.

Waitman Beorn (57:34.951)
I think another, I think another thing that I would, that I would just add in there and I wanted, I wanted to sort of steer the conversation a little bit towards this area. another thing that I learned, you know, initially from y'all is this idea of qualitative mapping. Right. So, so we're not just mapping something as again, I'm using scare quotes here for the audience, but something as, as discrete as when the ghetto opened, which no, it's not discrete, but you know, there is a thing as as a, you know, a time that a thing happened, but now we're mapping.

You know, something qualitative. And so it adds another step of, you know, was, was this get a open closed semi open. I'm making these up as I go along. But as you start to make categories that describe your data, then you or emotions, right? Like if you're, if we're trying to map what parts of a camp

are places of fear, places of commerce, places of, you know, survivor spaces or, or inmate spaces or SS spaces. You're, you're, then adding another set of, again, that has to be a zero one when you're mapping it. And so you then have to decide from a certain perspective, what do I mean by fear? How do I define that? which again, leads us to ask other questions.

about our, about our data and, and, and while we're making that determination, because I think you, we all in the back of our minds have this idea that you should be able to, if someone comes and says, Hey, why did you say this building was a space of fear? We should have an answer. We should say, this is why I chose that. Can you talk a little about, the idea? Cause I think this is really fascinating. It's something that our listeners will be less familiar with, which is the idea of mapping ideas, mapping emotions, mapping.

sort of qualitative characteristics of events.

Anne Knowles (59:34.556)
Tim, do you want to go first?

Tim (59:37.132)
Yeah, so this is something Alberto and I moved increasingly into. And I think this probably, I don't know, Anne, if you'd agree, it reflects maybe one of the shifts that's taken place amongst us as a group since we started, that we started tending to privileged perpetrator archives. So the building record of Ashwitz or the municipal records of ghettos in Budapest.

or even the Swedish legation list, you know, not a perpetrator, but an institution, you know, kind of a state based institution. And so we tended to, we often talk about that we tended to map more abstract space or maybe to map more what sometimes is talked about as locational locale. So location is a kind of place on the earth's surface. Locale is like a little bit more about the material nature of that or about the social or economic nature of that.

And I think one turning point in our work was a group led by Eric Steiner and Simone Gigliotti, Mark Maseroski, who started to map testimony. And what they did in a really interesting bit of work was to map silence in the testimony. So the places that people don't talk about, like where does a survivor not talk about? In this case, it was about an evacuation route, a death march route out of our streets. And I think all of us, and I think, this is true of you and Paul and Bert and myself have really got

more interested in thinking about, well, how do we start to map testimony? So how do we shift from an archive, which is maybe the perpetrator archive, to the victim or survivor archive? And how do we start to map what geographers would sometimes talk about a sense of place? So kind of the experiential nature of Auschwitz or the experiential nature of a ghetto like Budapest or of a death march, know, as Eric and Simone and Mark did.

And I think that's where you have to start using a totally different kind of repertoire of cartography. And so one of the things Alberto and I've been doing is trying to think about different ways of, for example, mapping emotions. So is there an emotional geography to the Holocaust? And if you look at multiple accounts from multiple survivors, do you find that certain places are connected with a dominant set of emotions?

Tim (01:01:59.342)
Is there a geography of fear across something like a city like Budapest or across the entire European continent? If you start to think about multiple survivors and where is that geography of fear? And does it shift and change over time? And does it change according to whether the survivor's male or female? And does it change according to who they're with, whether they're alone or with others? And so I think that's where suddenly you're asking spatial questions, aren't you? You're asking a question that has a location attached to it because you're kind of interested in

whether it's this camp, Buchenwald or another camp, Ravensbruck. But you're also asking a set of questions that aren't just about location, because they're really about felt experience of a place. Like what does Buchenwald feel like for these survivors? How would they describe it in their narrative? And are there ways we can translate text within their narrative if we have a transcript or if we watch it, the ways in which they tell a story?

that can mean that we can start to create a data set which is about a basic set of emotions. And then can we start to visualize that and can we start to suggest that the geographies of the Holocaust include say an emotional geography of the Holocaust. And I think that's work that I've become increasingly interested in. And I think, you know, in a sense it partly reflects the wider shift in the field, doesn't it? If you think about when I started out as a PhD student most of us were doing work with perpetrator.

documents and with state archives or municipal archives. know, like the big radical thing was to switch from the nation state level to the regional or local level in a lot of those. But we were tending to go to, know, like the state archives. I think if you think about the field, the field has really shifted where many graduate students today would just by default start using, the Shoah Foundation archive or USHMM or Yale for tune off one of the massive archives of oral history accounts.

And I think what's interesting is I feel like, we've probably done some of that as well as a group, that we started our work back in the 2000s, largely working with state documents and maybe asking questions about location and locale. And I think we've increasingly started to ask questions about sense of place and about the more experiential dimensions and to think about what does it look like to try and map the Holocaust from the perspective of Jews who experienced this event, as well as

Tim (01:04:19.38)
know, critically, I think remembering Paul's caution to write relational histories or geographies, which is like, actually, what's the nature of the system in which they find themselves? And I think that's where I really find myself drawn to at the moment, is trying to shift between the systemic and the individual, and to think about the different kinds of geographical questions and different kinds of cartographic methods and techniques that we might use to try and capture that more kind of holistic sense of the Holocaust.

Anne Knowles (01:04:45.52)
Yes, yes, Tim. This has been a shift for all of us, think, for me as well. And I'll try to keep my sort of closing comments brief, Whiteman, looking at the time. My research over the last couple of years has focused on developing a website, which I hope will launch any day now that will combine tagged testimonies, almost a thousand.

that have been tagged for place with a mapping platform of camps and ghettos. In the 977 testimonies, there are many camps and ghettos, but there are also thousands of other kinds of places. So we hope that people who use this website, which is called Placing the Holocaust, will be able to explore the meaning of barn, barrack, field, forest.

the unspecific, but for victims, extremely important places where things happened to them. Second thing I wanted to mention is that, yeah, for me as well, after our book, Geographies of the Holocaust came out in 2014, I turned to testimony for the first time. It was a brand new thing for me. And very quickly, out of spending some time,

with a couple of testimonies even. I became very interested in the concept of topology, the relationships between places that were not metric, but perceptual and experiential. And that produced a map called I Was There, which readers can find online, that is mostly topological about the movements and the meanings of places to two Holocaust survivors, a man and a woman.

And the last thought is that I'm really getting interested in what artists can bring to the depictions of place and the emotions of experience, the meaning of places experientially. And I'm particularly interested in that in hiding. I'm trying to develop a typology of hiding that I'll work with an artist to render as a visual typology based on testimonial accounts.

Anne Knowles (01:07:10.586)
So yeah, it's popping. There's so much to do there as well.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:16.712)
What, what do you see as the future directions? I know you've talked a little about it here and I, I hate that I'm going to say this, um, but AI and I'm cringing because I, a lot of the things, a lot of my responses, particularly generative AI is horrendous, but you know, what are the things that we can do positively or that you see where you see

a spatial research on the Holocaust going as we move forward into the future.

Tim (01:07:53.144)
I mean, I think one thing that I don't know if you'd say this as well is that I think spatial thinking has become more normalized within Holocaust studies. Like I think compared to when we started out, like it feels like a lot of graduate students just, you know, like I said, like testimony is kind of like not a, you'd have to fight with your supervisor about using testimony in your dissertation. I think the same probably about spatial approaches or asking geographical questions that I feel like that's become more normalized. And I think there's something really

Anne Knowles (01:08:02.726)
Yes.

Tim (01:08:23.01)
good about that, about actually this is just, it's kind of mad not to ask, like, where did this take place? Or like, where, what's the relationship between all of these different actors or these different events across time and space? You know, I think that, that I think is, is maybe one of the things that, you know, I'd see as a really great thing is if this isn't kind of like a separate subfield, but is actually integrated within the whole. And,

that asking spatial questions, that thinking about geographical data just becomes normal. Like I would love it that in, you that you, if a graduate student sits down in an archive and starts looking through a whole set of, say, letters, that they don't just ignore the address at the top, but they actually note it down. And they start to think, well, they're clusters of people writing from the same streets. And like, does this change over time? And like, what might that suggest? So they're not just looking at the content of the letter.

Anne Knowles (01:09:08.774)
Yeah.

Tim (01:09:20.256)
they're actually asking where was this letter sent from and where was it sent to and when was it sent from that place to that place you know that kind of thing I think is to me what would be great to see is that this just becomes normal that it would be odd not to engage in field work and go to the site you're writing about it would be odd not to write down the geographical data on what you're writing about you know any source that you're working with it would be odd not to ask spatial questions because spatial questions

are critical to every part of human history. So I feel like that's the thing that I think is starting to happen. And I think, you for me, that's great. It's really lovely. Because I think that's kind of like the thing that Andy Charlesworth hoped would happen back in the 90s. And I guess it's been really nice to be part of that process, you know, to be part of that, you know, as a group of scholars to be able to be part of that work that I think Andy sets off. And it's great to see that kind of becoming more, you know, mainstreamed and sort of normal.

Anne Knowles (01:10:15.376)
I agree with that, Tim, but I think you also have always been an optimist. And I have a little more pessimistic take because I expect, I see it already in my students, that AI, the growing use of AI by students is reinforcing the unfortunate belief abroad in society that we understand the Holocaust, there's nothing more to learn about.

So I see spatial work, because of all the qualities we've talked about today, as an antidote to AI. I'm sure people will figure out how to use it alongside the kinds of research that has driven our work. But I want people to get out in the field. I think physical experience is crucial and that recognizing the differences between places and the circumstances of people suffering, not just

suffering is what we're always going to need in Holocaust studies and that this kind of work can bring it. So I hope you're right that it will grow and that there will be more and more PhD supervisors who support it because that's been a problem. It really has I think, but maybe that's changing as well. It's up to your generation, Waitman. Carry the torch.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:32.392)
Thank

Tim (01:11:34.22)
Yeah, I think it's interesting that thing about AI and because I guess one of the challenges, the dangers of AI is a kind of flattening, you know, within some of the kind of large language models that it can tend towards a flattening. And I think that's one thing that in a sense that geography, know, historians are totally attuned to this, aren't they? That we say is, know, historians say the past is complex and geographers say the past is complex as well. You know, the present and the future is complex, the places are complex. And I think you, you don't want to kind of flattening of a sort of generic Holocaust that's the sort of

Anne Knowles (01:11:40.679)
Yes.

Tim (01:12:03.542)
some of its part kind of like lowest common denominator. Actually, it really matters that things looked a little bit different here than there, or then rather than at this point, like 42 is different from 43. And France is very different from Hungary. And that's really critical, I think, isn't it, is to kind of attend to that nuance. I mean, what are the, I am involved in a project now with colleagues in the UK, in the US, where we are trying to use large language models and AI to think about

distant reading testimony. And I think this is one of the challenges we're finding in that work is like, how do you do that in a way that doesn't flatten? And I think in a way that's sort of ethically responsible. And I think, you know, just to add to people's reading lists, I think one of the best scholars working on this at moment is Todd Pressner. Todd Pressner has got a really brilliant book out called The Ethics of the Algorithm. And I think it's a fantastic book because I think it draws attention to the fact that, you know, the digital humanities meets Holocaust studies and genocide studies that

questions of ethics have got to be to the fore. And it's not to dismiss the digital or spatial as a kind of, you know, like a crazy thing to do, but it's to think about what does ethically responsible scholarship look like within, say, the digital or after the digital or the spatial turn or whatever you might want to say. And I think Todd's, you know, really doing fantastic work at the forefront of really thinking that through in a way that, you know, if you look at his work, he embraces a whole range of digital methods and tools.

But he does it with a real eye to thinking about what would ethically responsible digital humanities work look like within the Holocaust. Todd might be a good person to get onto the podcast, wait a if you haven't had him already.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:43.517)
Yeah, no, that's, I have that in the works. That's, that's, that's definitely the list because I think, you know, one of the things that we're experiencing in this modern, this modern age, probably historians have always said this, but is the technology is galloping ahead, you know, and the, ethical considerations are, are kind of the only guy on the, on the horse trying to pull the reins back a little bit.

Um, and I think you can see that in a lot of different, different areas, you know, from, you know, is it useful to have the gamification of, of a Holocaust experience? Um, you know, there are people that have done that as a way to sort of try to teach tolerance or teach a history about it. Even in my work, you know, like the question of, you include humans in a digital model of a camp? You know, I chose not to.

But that's a, that's an ethical choice. It's not a technological choice because technologically we could do that. You know, that it's not that hard to sort of generate those kinds of things. So I think, I think that's important. And I think, you know, the, interesting question in terms of, cause I, I listened to this as this is inside baseball for our audience, but I listened to a presentation on, the work that Tim's doing in the larger language models.

and it's great. And it's not, it's not generative, you know, it's, it's analytical. It's, know, where are, where are people talking about various experiences in the chronological arc of their testimonies? thought was a really fascinating way of thinking about it. but somebody mentioned in the audience, something about, couldn't we create sort of. Gen AI generated Holocaust survivor testimony based off of this. And I think there was like the urge to out of the room because this is exactly what we.

don't want to ever happen because once that it's, like, which, what is possible now with, with, know, generative fake videos and fake voices. And, know, that, that question of a now, not just how do we analyze something, but what is actually genuine becomes a whole different issue. so hopefully, yeah, hopefully, you know, we will, those of us that are doing it are doing it. I know that those of us doing are doing it responsibly, but.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:04.68)
You know, other people may not. Um, but before, I don't want to end on such a downer note. So maybe I'll, end with our, question that I always ask, um, our guests, which is, um, can you tell us about one book, uh, that has been influential or foundational in your, in your study of the Holocaust or your understanding of the Holocaust. And again, with the understanding that this is like asking who your favorite band is, you know, it could change.

Anne Knowles (01:16:33.586)
You

Waitman Beorn (01:16:34.054)
you know, any day of the week or twice on Sunday. But for now, at this moment in time, what would you say to that question?

Anne Knowles (01:16:42.098)
The book that haunts me is Dora Bruder, short little book by brilliant author Modiano about his trying to trace what happened to a teenage girl in Paris who almost certainly perished in Auschwitz. But it is all about the lacuna.

Tim (01:16:42.958)
Smith.

Anne Knowles (01:17:09.116)
But he doesn't know, I keep picturing her, there's one passage where he finds the school that she attended kind of unwillingly. And he knows that she was there in the winter. And I know from our weather modeling that it snowed. And so I keep picturing her footprints in snow and the danger of being that visible if police are out to find you, which they probably were. So that's the one that.

There's a problem I'm trying to work through in my mind of how to represent that experience visually. What happened to her or at least Modiano's representation of it. Really qualitative. It's going to have to be artistic. And if I'm able to do that in the end, I'll feel like I've accomplished something.

Tim (01:18:01.038)
Maybe I'll go for something that's more geographical. Wait a if that's okay, as a book that really influenced me. And I think it has influenced a lot of historians is Henri Lefebvre, the production of space. It's translated into English and French. And I read that as a graduate student. And I think it just helped me to think differently about the relationship between state society and space. And it's one of those books that's like the Andy Charlesworth essay.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:05.8)
side.

Tim (01:18:30.974)
topography of genocide, just kind of like set me spark things. And maybe that's like your book. And like, think, I guess I'm always interested in books that spark things like a book where I feel like after reading that book, I'm, asking new questions or I'm having new thoughts. You know, you read some books and you're like, I've learned something new. and there's a place for those kinds of books. But I think to me, the really interesting, exciting books are the books that you read and you don't just learn something new, you actually think differently. And that's certainly what happened when I read on real affairs.

Anne Knowles (01:18:58.524)
Yes.

Tim (01:19:00.834)
production of space.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:02.664)
Well, thank you both so much for coming on. As always, it's just, I like to just listen because, you know, now I want to go do a map of something instead of all the work that I should be doing. For everybody else, again, thank you for listening. Please subscribe, follow, like, give us a comment if there's something that you're, and I use the word in scare quotes, enjoying in the podcast.

Anne Knowles (01:19:13.82)
You

Waitman Beorn (01:19:30.512)
I'm finding useful finding thought provoking. And again, Tim and Anne, thank you so much for coming on.

Anne Knowles (01:19:39.602)
Thanks.

Tim (01:19:40.29)
pleasure. It's great and it's lovely to chat with Anne again. It's really nice to talk together.

Anne Knowles (01:19:43.634)
It's been a treat. Yes. Thank you, Waidman.

Tim (01:19:50.146)
See ya.