Exploring Life in Concentration Camps through a Visual Analysis of Prisoners’ Diaries

Richard Khulusi*, Stephanie Billib, Stefan Jänicke

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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Abstract

Diaries are private documentations of people’s lives. They contain descriptions of events, thoughts, fears, and desires. While diaries are usually kept in private, published ones, such as the diary of Anne Frank, show that they bear the potential to give personal insight into events and into the emotional impact on their authors. We present a visualization tool that provides insight into the Bergen-Belsen memorial’s diary corpus, which consists of dozens of diaries written by concentration camp prisoners. We designed a calendar view that documents when authors wrote about concentration camp life. Different modes support quantitative and sentiment analyses, and we provide a solution for historians to create thematic concepts that can be used for searching and filtering for specific diary entries. The usage scenarios illustrate the importance of the tool for researchers and memorial visitors as well as for commemorating the Holocaust.

Original languageEnglish
Article number54
JournalInformation
Volume13
Issue number2
Number of pages23
ISSN2078-2489
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Keywords

  • Concentration camp
  • Diaries
  • Visual analytics
  • Visualization

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