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

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

Active Learning in Digital Heritage:Introducing Geo-localisation, VR and AR at Holocaust Historical Sites

Currently, Holocaust history education faces two challenges: the authentication and availability of its information and the need for more effective pedagogical methods for Historical and Cultural Learning. This study presents the impact of the Future Memory tablet application which combines the active, embodied exploration of historical information with geo-localised presentation using virtual and augmented reality technology. We report three recent studies where the application was tested with a total of 147 participants. The results confirm that active, embodied exploration of historical information facilitates learning more as compared to standard exhibitions. In addition, our results show that memory consolidation and learning is facilitated by prior knowledge while negative emotions can have a detrimental effect on learning outcomes. Lastly, our results show that combining historical information with a spatialised VR/AR environment leads to significantly better learning outcomes as compared to using a spatial representation alone. These results provide strong support for the model of Historical and Cultural Learning pursued in the Future Memory project, which grounds the learning experience in the situated, active and individualised engagement with historical sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploratory Analysis of the Applicability of Formalised Knowledge to Personal Experience Narration

Some of the victims of Nazi prosecution have consigned their personal experiences in the form of diaries of their internment in concentration camps. Such human-centric texts may contrast with the organisation of knowledge about such events that, for example, historians and archivists make. In this work, we analyse six such narrations with the use of Entity Extraction and Named Entity Recognition techniques, present the results of the corresponding exploration, and discuss the suitability of such tools on this corpus. We show that knowledge tools, that have been successfully used to organise documents, can be lacking when describing personal accounts, and we suggest ways to alleviate this