Anne Kelly Knowles: Telling Spatial Stories: Geographic Imagination and the Holocaust

The way we imagine the past can deeply affect how we understand it. How do the spatial stories embodied in maps and animations differ from conventional historical narratives? Anne Knowles will explore that question by describing a pioneering research project on the geographies of the Holocaust. Examples will include geographic visualizations of the growth of the concentration camp system, the patterns of German atrocities in Eastern Europe, and the built environment of Auschwitz.

Anne Kelly Knowles is Associate Professor of Geography at Middlebury College. For more than fifteen years, she has been a pioneer in historical GIS. Her two edited books, Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (ESRI Press 2002) and Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (ESRI Press 2008), along with special issues of the journals Social Science History and Historical Geography, have become benchmarks in this interdisciplinary field. As an historical geographer, she has specialized in American immigration and industrialization, the subjects of Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier (University of Chicago Press 1997) and Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, in press). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Anne is currently Principal Investigator with Alberto Giordano (Texas State at San Marcos) on the Holocaust Historical GIS project, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Auschwitz-Birkenau under construction. As far as we have been able to document so far, the buildings shown in red or red-black were built or rebuilt from May 1943 to February 1944. This image helped us reconceive Birkenau as a vast, chaotic construction site, which may help explain why there was a spike in the number of escapes during this period. The main axis of the camp runs from the entrance gate in the lower right to the two crematoria in the upper left. The bright light in the center highlights the theoretical view of a guard standing in the center of that area. Map by Chester Harvey, Paul B. Jaskot,and Anne Kelly Knowles.