This project originated with the realization by Dr. Beorn that there is no holistic, dynamic, and accurate map that covers the whole range of experiences during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.  The Martin Gilbert "scary arrow" map of Einsatzgruppen movements (below) is a good example of the abstract approaches to mapping that Dr. Beorn was interested in improving.

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The team turned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.  The encyclopedia offers scholarly, archivally-based entries that contain a wealth of geographic, temporal, and event-driven data that can be mined.  Moreover, the entries are organized geographically by German administrative region.  This made focusing the work easier.

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An example of the kinds of data found in the USHMM Encyclopedia.

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Team members do not simply enter data.  Rather, they are challenged continually to code the data, addressing the ambiguities of historical sources that must be translated into data that can be used in a Geographic Information System (GIS).  This kind of work also requires a growing understanding of the history itself as the context in which to categorize information.  

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An example of the back end database from the GIS from the USHMM Encyclopedia.

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Distrikt Galizien has been completed and the team chose to work on Distrikt Lublin next as it was part of the Generalgouvernment starting in 1939 (as opposed to 1941 for Galicia) and thus offers different trends and historical events over a longer period, making for a valuable comparison to Galizien.  We will likely focus next on the Reichskommissariat Ukraine which offers a different administrative system and context.