Animating the Jäger Aktions: Ek3 in Lithuania

Alexander Yule & Robert Burton

Middlebury College

23 March 2009

Introduction•Geographies of the Holocaust project

•Collaboration: USHMM, Professor Anne Knowles PhD, NSF

•Context:

•An exceptionally well-documented instance of state-sponsored murder

•Exciting new partnerships and data sources

Research Questions•How can we create a meaningful visual

representation of the Einsatzgruppen massacres?

•Analytical avenues: Scale, linearity, strategy, coordination (or lack thereof), organizational context

•“Hypothesis”: Animation

Karl Jäger

Geodatabase

Complications•Issues with geocoding historic German names for Lithuanian places that no longer exist

•(In)consistency of temporal resolution

•Dunaburg: 10,000 dead over 39 days vs. Daily death tolls elsewhere

•Solution: Transform into death rate

•Assumes constant rate of killing (unlikely)

•Victim breakdown data

•Same as above, also used averages to fill holes

Mapping• Initial attempts: Use tweens to show movement

• Complete chaos (and assumes far too much)

• Daily snapshots

• ArcMap » Flash (vector)

• Loss of spatial reference info... (future: read straight from geodatabase)

• ArcMap Animator » PNG .mov » Photoshop » Flash (raster)

• Flash as ideal delivery platform

• Ability to add dynamic fields/controls and interactivity (some day)

• Symbology: Proportional points sized by death rates, beginning date and end date

QuickTime and aªAnimation decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Discussion• Questions:

• How did their activity develop over space and time?

• How does this add to our understanding of their operational strategy?

• Perspectives on linearity

• Holocaust historiography: intentional vs. functional

• Further study needed

• Need for more sources, especially survivor/spectator accounts

• Research individual massacres (i.e. Dunaburg)

• Technical animating issues (Arc Animator is horrible!!!!!)

• Vector-based workflow needed

• Spatial History Lab at Stanford

• Read straight from geodatabase into Flash! (coming soon)

Conclusion•Animation is useful as both an exploratory and

analytical device, as well as a visceral, experiential means of communication.

•The animated maps, and their underlying conceptualizations, offer an innovative perspective on historical events encoded in tabular data.

•Audience: Visceral and accessible without sacrificing academic integrity or precision. Valuable to both scholars and the general public!