Paul Jaskot, professor of art, art history and visual studies, co-organized with Robert M. Ehrenreich Visualization and the Holocaust: A Symposium, held on January 17-18, 2019 at the Nasher Museum of Art. The symposium was co-sponsored by the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies (Duke University) and The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). Additional support was provided by the Nasher Museum of Art; Office of the Dean, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Humanities Division; Duke Research Computing; John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; and the Center for Jewish Studies.

The public conference (Nasher Museum) and non-public expert workshop (Wired! Lab) sought to reflect synthetically on the first decade of historical and spatial analysis of the Holocaust through the use of digital methods. What interpretive problems are illuminated by different physical, textual, and visual sources, such as physical killing sites, bureaucratic documents and postwar survivor interview transcripts, photographs and maps? What digital methods can manage and integrate large volumes of diverse historical evidence that has previously been used in depth mainly in locally focused case studies? How can we use the iterative process of computational analysis as a positive mode of inquiry to ask more probing and complex questions? And what new insights could computational approaches yield?