Collaboration with
Center for the Urban History of East Central Europe
Collaborators
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Waitman Wade Beorn
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Taras Nazaruk
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Drew MacQueen
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Chris Gist
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Ryan Wolfe
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Matthew Poliakoff
Dr. Beorn's monograph research led thankfully into a close collaboration with the Center for the Urban History of East Central Europe. The Center is a fantastic collective of scholars and digital humanists dedicated to exploring, analyzing, and presenting the complex and diverse history of Lviv. Without their support, many of our projects in Visualizing the Holocaust in Eastern Europe would be possible. We are so very grateful to the center personnel below:
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Dr. Harald Binder, Center Founder and President of the Board
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Dr. Sofia Dyak, Director
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Bohdan Shumylovych, Coordinator of "Urban Media Archive"
Fortunately, the team has been able to also collaborate in the work of the Center. Among its many other projects, the Center is also committed to bringing awareness to Jewish life and the Holocaust in Lviv, particularly as we approach the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Lviv by the Soviets in 1944.
Taras Nazaruk and Waitman Wade Beorn are working together on a variety of StoryMaps showing the personal journeys of Lviv Jews and perpetrators at the city level. The first draft of these story maps involves showing the life of Holocaust survivor Leon Wells in Lviv. Taras is showing, often by street address, where Leon went and what he experienced, before, during, and after the Holocaust in Lviv. This is a multimedia presentation including testimony, historical images, and spatial data. He hopes that this will help Lviv residents better relate to their vanished Jewish neighbors who moved among them in the same city.
In addition, the team shares its data, such as the Lviv Ghetto Mapping Project with the Center and Center team members are critical in correcting and improving the data. They are able to take general testimony and provide street addresses. This is only possible because they are experts in the history of their city. One of the most amazing projects created by the Center is the Lviv Streets platform which provides an interactive environment that tracks all of the street name changes throughout the city for three hundred years and throughout multiple regimes in multiple languages. Lviv Streets has been an invaluable aid in the work of the team.
Example of Street Data from the Lviv Streets project
Finally, the team is working together with the Center and others to help create signage and other ways of placing visual reminders of the Holocaust throughout Lviv at key locations.