Welcome.
I'm Elizabeth Cropper, Dean
of the Center for Advanced Study
in the Visual Arts
here at the National Gallery
of Art.
And in welcoming you all here
to today's conference dedicated
to new projects
in digital art history, which
is being supported by CASVA's
International Exhibitions Fund,
my welcome has a much wider
reach than is usual.
For, for the first time,
our conference--
we hope-- is being live streamed
through the National Gallery
of Art Live website.
And in connection with that,
we all want to thank the Media
Production department
and Technical Solutions
department
at the gallery's newly formed
media hub for all their support
and dedication.
They've done really
a tremendous job
over the past weeks and months,
and we keep our fingers crossed
that this first test
of our new way of having greater
public access
will, in fact, succeed
for everyone,
but thank you all back there.
So that said, a bit of history.
I want to remind you all
that at CASVA we last convened
a meeting
around digital research in 2010,
and that was intended
to celebrate the launch
of the website, the history
of the Accademia di San Luca
1590
to 1630, which
is
the pioneering relational
database created
by Associate Dean Peter
Lukehart and his team
over a period of years,
and initially supported
by the Getty Foundation.
On that occasion four years ago,
we heard from Robert Darnton
on the history of books
and the digital future,
and we had workshop
presentations on the world
of Dante, Digital Karnak,
the European Cultural Heritage
Online, or the ECHO Project,
and the open access
infrastructure supported
by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
It seems a long time ago now.
And in the intervening four
years, we've all been very busy.
The digital world, moving
with characteristic speed,
has changed around us.
One thing I think just locally
I want to mention that has made
a real difference
here was the appointment
of a research associate
dedicated to digital art
history, supported by Robert H.
Smith and the Smith Family
Foundation.
Emily Pugh, known to many
of you, our first appointee,
is now carrying on her good work
at the Getty,
and I think these kinds
of personal connections
are going to be very
important in carrying forward
the work of digital projects
in the future.
And one thing was very clear
as we planned this new meeting,
which, like the earlier one,
is as much about connecting
people and problems as it is
a series of polished displays.
The thing that was clear--
that it's time to think
about digital history of art
in a specific sense,
rather than as a subdivision
of some sort
of general digital humanities.
Our title could just as well
be New Digital Projects in Art
History.
It often seems that the word
and image problem that has long
plagued certain kinds of art
history
has begun to replicate itself--
more than begun--
has replicated itself
in digital scholarship.
To some critics, it has seemed
that text and number driven
digital scholarship
was able to streak out
of the starting blocks,
while art historians dedicated
to complex visual phenomena
were chastised
for a lack of enterprise
and even collegiality.
The Accademia project was just
one piece of local evidence
against this charge,
but much of the problem
did, in fact,
lie in the seemingly
irresolvable, but fundamentally
entrenched
issues of the rights
and reproduction of images,
which in the case of works
of art,
have long histories that differ
from country to country
and century to century.
So the decision by the trustees
of the National Gallery
and
its successful implementation
that high quality digital images
of our entire collection
would be made available free
of charge put us all in a better
place as far as digital art
history was concerned.
And I think for all of us,
before criticizing too loudly,
we need to have our own house
in order.
The gallery's successful launch
of its online catalog
of Dutch paintings as part
of the Getty's OSCI project
has also helped our standing
in this new world, as has
the invention
of the Conservation Shelf
project, which is supported
by the Andrew Mellon Foundation,
something
that we'll be hearing much more
about, I think, in the future.
The redesign of the Gallery's
website, not just in terms
of appearance,
but also in terms of program
has made possible a more open
process for change and a wider
access on the part of staff
on behalf of the public.
All this is the result
of hard work and cooperation
and has in many ways
liberated digital scholarship
at the Gallery.
But I think there's been a more
general and even more welcome
development, something I've
become aware of at many meetings
of the Mellon Research
Initiative
at the Institute of Fine Arts,
at the meetings of the CAA,
especially the Kress
Foundation's THATCamps,
and through SAH, RSA,
through such projects
as the Nineteenth-Century Art
Online,
and only very recently
at meetings of ARIAH and RIHA
at the Clark Institute,
as well
as in daily conversations
with fellows at CASVA.
And this concerns
the recognition
of the special nature
of research in the history
of world art,
the traditions and standards
of our discipline
and the contribution art
historians
have to make
to the understanding
of the human environment
and its artifacts.
This is a moment, I think now,
to think about the art
historical world of the eye,
the sense of touch,
the third dimension
about cognitive aesthetics,
and, yes, also once again
the relationship of word
to image.
As you've seen
over the past decade,
historians of art have much
to offer digital scholarship
and vice versa, including
new questions for art history
and new solutions
for some old ones.
It's quite clear, I think,
however, that art history has
its own place and role to play
and cannot or should not be
subordinate to or a shadow
of humanities disciplines.
Interdisciplinary work must move
beyond the exploitation
of images as illustration.
The past years have also brought
some new realities.
With our Accademia website,
for example, we've encountered
serious problems
of sustainability.
My own work for the European
Research Council
and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
made me very aware some years
ago of the inevitability
of this, even
as, in fact, millions of euros,
if sadly not yet millions
of dollars,
are being put
into digital projects.
And we will probably talk
about this in the course
of the day.
Then there are human problems
that are linked
to financial ones,
exposing real tremors
in the workplace and lack
of standards in the academy.
We probably won't talk about
that today, but we shouldn't
ignore it.
I look forward to this program
tremendously
and will lose no more time
in getting started.
Therese O'Malley, Associate Dean
of the Center, whose
own website, HEALD,
or the History
of the Early American Landscape
Design, is about to be launched,
and who has worked together
with Catherine Southwick, as
well as Peter Lukehart,
to put together this program.
We'll introduce
our first speakers.
I look forward very much
to discussion.
Therese.
[APPLAUSE]
Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for joining us today.
The format of the program
will be that we'll have four
speakers this morning,
and there will be time
after each of the papers
for a few questions.
And then after the sixth paper,
there will be
a general discussion.
The afternoon will be moderated
by Paul Jaskot, but right now it
gives me great pleasure
to introduce him as a speaker.
He is Professor of the History
of Art and Architecture
at DePaul University in Chicago,
and he is also the Paul Mellon
Professor at CASVA for 2014
to 2016.
Paul's scholarship focuses
on the history of modern art
and architecture
with a particular interest
in the impact of culture
on Nazi-era
and postwar German politics,
as well
as on the architectural history
of Chicago.
His books include
The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar
German Art and the Politics
of the Right, 2012, Beyond
Berlin: Twelve German Cities
Confront the Nazi Past, 2008,
and The Architecture
of Oppression:
The SS Forced Labor
and Nazi Monumental Building
Economy, 2000.
Beyond
his impressive publication
record and his very active role
in the university,
Paul is recognized
for his generous professional
service.
He is currently a delegate
to the National Committee
on the History of Art.
He serves on the art history
advisory committee for the GRI.
He was the director
of the Holocaust Education
Foundation, and he was also
the president of the College Art
Association from 2008 to 2010,
during which time
he was deeply involved
in the CAA fair use
and publication task forces.
He has been a very important
interlocutor in the realm
of digital art history,
promoting its discussion,
instruction, and demystification
in such events as the THATCamp
at CAA's annual meeting,
and last summer he ran
the Institute on Digital Mapping
and Art History sponsored
by the Kress Foundation
at Middlebury College.
Paul has been
a tireless promoter, busily
consciousness raising,
driven by a conviction
that digital mapping
of historical evidence
can open up new veins
of research in art history,
and so we're very
happy that he's going to open
the discussion today.
Paul.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Therese,
it's really great to be here,
and I also want to thank you,
and Peter, and Caroline,
for organizing us and bringing
us together.
Interesting also that Elizabeth
opened this up with the question
of word and image.
I would like to also think
about that in terms of archive
and object.
I think that's another way
of putting that.
In 2011, the Zentralinstitut fur
Kunstgeschichte in Munich
launched an important web
resource on the great German art
shows, the exhibitions of state
sponsored art shown
during the Nazi era.
As part of the press reaction
to the launch, Okwui Enwezor,
director of Munich's Haus der
Kunst, where the original show
took place--
you see an image here--
stated, quote,
"Hitler's collecting gives us
an insight in how banal
most of these art works were,
and that the Grosse Deutsche
Kunstausstellung,
great German art shows,
mainly reflected the taste
of a dictator."
End quote.
Few art historians would
challenge Enwezor's
characterization of the art
on display
or indeed
the cultural production
of the entire period, and yet
the choice of the descriptor
banal
is I think an extraordinarily
loaded word in the study
of the Nazi period
due primarily to Hannah Arendt's
famous essay, "Eichmann
in Jerusalem:
A Report on the Banality
of Evil,"
which appeared in 1963.
When applied to art,
the term is used to dismiss,
but when applied to Eichmann,
it is, of course, meant to evoke
how pervasive genocidal actions
were with seemingly normal
bureaucrats
and in mundane corners
of the state.
Banal art is excluded
from 20th century art history.
Modernism is privileged
while the traditional, vulgar,
repetitive, vernacular
visual world is generally
rendered irrelevant.
Comparatively speaking, Arendt's
complex and critical conception
of Nazi politics and society
that hinges on her use
of the word banal is nowhere
to be found in the art
historical account.
In art history,
what is the relevance of art
and architecture of seemingly no
quality or design complexity?
Certainly an extreme case
of this question
must be the built environment
at Auschwitz, and environment
of generic and mostly functional
buildings I am labeling broadly
vernacular.
In what follows,
I will try to show how
an analysis of such a case
indeed
of banal architecture more
generally can indicate
central art historical problems
that are also best suited
to the use of digital mapping
tools,
and therefore possibly of most
interest for other art
historical subjects.
Not all art historical questions
need digital answers, after all,
but in this case study,
digital mapping as part
of the research process
opens up on the one hand
the methodological potential
of digital art history
to invigorate the question
of vernacular architecture
as a central subject of art
history,
and on the other, a more
critical historical analysis
of one of the most brutal
architectural planning endeavors
in the modern period.
Here I will build on the work
my co-author Anne Kelly Knowles
and I have been doing
over the past seven years
as part of the Holocaust
Geography Collaborative.
In our particular piece
of this larger collaborative,
we have been using
geographic information systems,
or GIS, to explore buildings
at the difficult site of the SS
concentration camp at Auschwitz,
as well as the larger SS camp
system as a whole.
Dealing with some of our GIS
maps,
stills from a simple animation,
and a reconstruction of part
of the camp's built environment
in Google SketchUp,
I will ask what research issues
are relevant to and revealed
by the use
of these digital tools
and other visual evidence,
such as photography,
to investigate different scales
of activity.
Thinking
through the visualization
of the built environment
at Auschwitz
deepens our understanding
of both the complexity
of digital methods,
as well as
the fundamental problems
of longstanding interest
to critical art history.
In this case,
I argue in particular for a more
structurally intricate and total
architectural analysis, the goal
of social art history
from Arnold Hauser
to the present.
Digital methods can help us
address this goal.
In turn, the study
of the construction
of vernacular buildings
at Auschwitz compellingly links
geographic and art
historical concerns
to the potentially critical
questions at the center
of the digital humanities.
Like all methods,
those in the digital humanities
answer certain kinds
of questions best.
As we well know, such questions
include most prominently
an emphasis
on so-called big data.
That is information that is
so vast that it cannot be
processed through normal
scholarly means.
Father Roberto Busa,
an Italian Jesuit, is generally
credited with starting
this trend when, in 1949, he met
with Thomas Walter, the head
of IBM.
He persuaded Walter to help him
make a complete concordance
of Saint Augustine's corpus,
a project that was finally
finished in the 1970s
and still lives on the web
at this website.
Coupled with this emphasis
in digital humanities
on large amounts of data
is, of course, an interest
in modularity.
The computer environment,
especially with IBM,
tended more and more to favor
modular thinking rather than
linear thinking--
networks instead of lines,
if you will.
IBM even began to model
that
in their architectural
commissions
for the modular network
of connected labs
they developed globally
in the 1960s,
such as the example from Marcel
Breuer here.
Added to the emphasis
on modularity
was another concept favored
by the digital environment,
and that is the totalizing
expansiveness of networks.
Best embodied
by the introduction of the World
Wide Web in 1994, the sharing
of information with vast numbers
of people perfectly complemented
the compartmentalization
of modular thinking
and highlighted the potential
for access to big data.
Thus, by the late 1990s,
the moment at which we start
to see the initial expansion
of digital humanities
centers at universities,
the digital environment itself
has already privileged the kinds
of questions best suited
for its methods.
Those questions
with large amounts
of documentation or text,
problems that have
a modular systemic component
to them, and events, especially
involving large networks.
Now I review these well known
roots of these concepts
to emphasize the fact
that the digital is not merely
a tool, but rather
an historical epistemology
related
to other modern historical
contexts and events governed
by similar ideologies
and practices.
In this sense,
there are clear ways in which
this predisposition
to certain kinds of questions
connects
to central historical problems
in Holocaust studies--
above all, the workings
of large scale systems
of modern bureaucracy.
Here, for example,
is SS architect Lothar
Hartjenstein's plan for the camp
and SS housing estate
around Auschwitz One,
the core camp of the larger
complex.
Hartjenstein studied in Hanover
and then Stuttgart,
where he worked
with, among others, Paul
Schmitthenner and Gerhard
Graubner,
a student of Paul Bonatz.
Produced in November of 1942,
this design
was the last comprehensive plan
for the site.
I would note that clearly there
are visual distinctions made
between, for example,
the area of the camp,
the forced labor operations
to the east of the camp,
and the SS housing estate
further east of that.
Hartjenstein has conceived
the plan in terms
of traditional spatial modules
that nevertheless function
together as a related place
of SS dominance and ideology.
Bureaucracies, even
the brutal ones of the SS,
require this combination
of networks and modules
in order to manage large groups
of people and resources.
Combined with the interest
this generation of young Weimar
trained architects
expressed in the distribution
of functional spaces
on an urban scale,
this
is
a palpable historical attitude
that lends itself
to digital methods.
My bigger point here
is
that,
in the digital environment,
we need to start as much
with historical questions
as we do with digital methods.
In this case, spatial and also
temporal relationships, as well
as distributions of functions
as you can see on this map--
that is topologies and networks,
if you will, were crucial to SS
ideology and the inmate
experience which makes
the digital mapping of Auschwitz
of particular interest.
For our research project,
getting a grip
on the macro perspective
of the vastness of SS
systemic thinking,
as well as the micro level
of the individual structure
or body in space,
could be most easily achieved
through the use of a database
that would help organize
and manage the information.
In practice, what this meant
was that Knowles and I had to do
both the archival work
of contexts and events governed
by similar ideologies
and practices--
the archival work
of investigating
the architectural office
and creating the database
while we worked on rendering
the data using different GIS
and 3D tools.
Our mutual interest
in investigating what kind
of spatial patterns, if any,
would come out of visualizing
the archive
raised a constant set
of complex geographical and
architectural historical
questions.
This dialogic and iterative
process also led us
to specific scalar questions.
But why Auschwitz?
Auschwitz was, of course,
a linchpin in carrying out both
the racist and militarist ideals
of the heart of Hitler's goals,
and crucial to these
goals was the construction
of the appropriate built
environment.
Yet, in spite
of the impressive work
that scholars have already done
on this built environment,
there are also many things
about these spaces
that we don't know that indeed
get in the way of our knowing.
That is to say,
it is an environment in which
visualizations of space
through the digital
seem destined to help us
determine historical areas
of experience.
Previous scholarship has focused
on images such as the one
on the screen.
Previous scholarship has focused
either on the scale determined
by the static plan, which you
see on the upper left,
and they concentrate
particularly on Bauhaus graduate
Fritz Ertl's
layout for the Birkenau,
or on a few specific building
sites like the entrance
pavilion, which you see
on the lower right.
Yes, this accounts for only
a small number of buildings
and spaces
among the literally thousands
which the SS planned,
designed, and constructed
with forced labor at Auschwitz,
let alone other constructions
in the 1,000 plus camp system.
In addition, art historically
the banal vernacular structures
are obviously considered
irrelevant to the canon,
but function or aesthetic aside,
there are also just too
many buildings and sites
to contend
with in any standard way.
It is not surprising
that the central building
office, or the Zentrale
Bauleitung
was one of the largest
architectural offices
of its day.
The massive scope
of the operation
has been perhaps the greatest
hindrance
to a systemic analysis,
but one that dovetails
with questions best suited
for digital exploration.
Now, initially to tackle
this complex problem we
decided to work at the scale
of the individual,
as we were interested in asking
how the built environment
contributed
to the relative visibility
or invisibility of both inmates
and perpetrators in the camp.
This required locating
the buildings as accurately
as possible in space,
starting
with the georectified base
map you see here.
Chester Harvey developed
this map for the analysis
of the urban plan
and also with the help
of the vast archival record
of plans and elevations
began work on a three
dimensional rendering
of all buildings
in one part of the larger SS
area of interest,
the area of Auschwitz-Birkenau,
and that's this right here.
It's
so-called Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Now, accuracy was crucial,
as visibility naturally could be
impacted by a matter of inches.
We avoided the generally
schematic depiction
of the barracks environment,
which you see in most
literature, for example,
and located at least
six different types of barracks
and sizes of buildings,
as well as other structures
like this potato storage
facility.
What this would allow us to do
would be to map testimony,
to show individual stories
by doing what is called
a viewshed analysis that
represents what one person could
see from a given point,
placing them in the built
environment,
as you can see here.
Mapping multiple viewsheds could
expose patterns of experience
that would then raise
different historical questions,
challenging in particular the
undynamic assumption
that the camp was a totally
regulated and organized zone.
The digital visualization was
not an endpoint, but rather,
like archival research,
spurred further questions
of the built environment in need
of analysis.
In working
with the individual building
reconstructions, we also added
time signatures to the database
indicating the start and end
dates of construction
of each individual building.
Now, I found some of these dates
clearly listed in the archive--
that was the good day--
while some were only partial,
and others were
approximate and subject
to my interpretation, as
would be typical of the record
of any vast and diverse
urban site.
Big data it might or might not
be, but fuzzy data it certainly
was.
When we started to add
the temporal data
of construction of the project,
however, the research question
began to change
in surprising ways,
and I have to say I've been
working on this area of interest
for over 19 years,
and I was shocked.
The visualization of the archive
through the database
raised different problems
than what would have been
evident from the more
traditional analysis
of the architectural drawings
or the viewing of a sequence
of a few static plans.
In particular, the red buildings
that you see highlighted
in this 3D image
represent the number
of buildings that were
new construction
or significantly rebuilt
during a very specific period
of interest, May of 1943,
when the plans
for the entire camp complex
were finalized,
and spring of 1944 when
the Hungarian Jews were deported
to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
After animating the start
and end dates of the buildings--
and Chester showed me this
in a room one day, and I didn't
even know you could animate
things back in the day--
what we began to see
was not only that construction
was important, that it was
important at very specific
moments,
particularly in the end of '43
and early '44.
At times, it created
a dense and variable built
environment, one that showed
constant flexibility change
and chaos, not the order
and regulation of the SS world
we are used to reading about.
Indeed, using
different visual tools
helps to make this point clear.
Here we more recently
have graphed the data
of daily construction activity
that supports the 3D rendering
you just saw.
The result is a view
of the built environment
entirely
unexpected from the historical
literature.
It is also because
of the relative change,
and shift, and the dynamism
of this graph,
not the consistency
of the graph.
It is also equally
revealing of how unpredictable
the spatial environment could be
for both the individual scale
of the inmate,
but also
the structural conception
of the SS architects.
Importantly, for example,
the analysis of the fluidity
of the built environment
might explain why two thirds
of all escape attempts recorded
at Auschwitz over its five year
history
occurred exactly in this window
of time, a fact many historians
have noted, but have never
explained.
The mapping process led
to the archival and visual
exploration of construction
activity, which produced
interpretive results leading
to new historical research
questions, and I would add we're
no longer talking
about visibility
and invisibility
at the starting point.
We're now talking
about construction activity,
which is a shift in the research
question
that happened
through the visualization
process.
But the visualization
of our research at this stage
led to yet more relational
questions, particularly
at the systemic scale of the SS
camp system as a whole.
If construction played such
an active role at Auschwitz,
did it function
in any significant way
in the other camps
under SS control?
A question that we did not think
about until it became evident
at Auschwitz.
Knowles has helped me to ask
this question through our use
of GIS
to explore the camp's database
to form the core of the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum's camp
encyclopedia project.
Working with the 1,111 SS camps
in that database,
we tagged the information
in the encyclopedia in reference
to labor categories
that we developed.
Using this rubric, our team
was able to identify entries
in which, for example,
construction and armaments were
listed as primary activities
for forced labor
at specific camp sites.
The map of this data,
which you see on the screen,
visualizes the clear clustering
of camps, the red dots
in the center, at which
armaments production was
a primary function of forced
labor,
but much more surprising,
though, are the large number
of construction sites focused
along the periphery
of the overall camp
system in which construction was
the major activity at the site.
Just as construction activity
became so evident
in the visualization
of the Auschwitz data, its role
in the SS system
as a whole indicates a larger
function of this labor
than scholars have realized,
and if you read the literature
on forced labor camps,
it's
all about armaments production.
No one talks about construction,
which also means no one
is looking at the role
of the architects.
This forced labor work
intersects at three
spatial scales--
the individual inmate's
work experience,
the institutional practice
of the SS,
and the systemic needs
of the political economy
of the Nazi state at war.
By July of 1942,
these systemic needs included as
well a shockingly large forced
labor construction force--
and this is just at Auschwitz--
of over 10,000 men and women
working daily at the behest
of SS architects.
Significantly, our interest
in exploring the construction
labor files
came only after the questions
raised by their earlier
visualization,
not from our initial approach
to the archive.
Hence, looking
at the visualization
and analysis of evidence
from both the local scale
and the systemic scale,
we can see that construction
activity played a much more
significant role
within the forced labor
organization of the SS
and the lives and deaths of tens
of thousands
of European
Jews and other victim groups
than previously assumed.
Building the thousands
of vernacular structures
indicates the political role
of architecture
during this brutal period.
Thinking at a temporal scale
of the camp construction
activity, such as with the map
on the upper left that shows
change over time,
and also the larger geographic
scale of the camp system
means as well
that different kinds
of questions
come to the fore in relation
to the built environment.
Above all, we lose the focus
on individual buildings
as finished and static objects,
thus deemphasizing the role
of design in exchange for that
of construction, and we should
remember here that Arnold
Hauser-- again, someone I'm very
much following--
argued that art production has
its own history worthy
of analysis
separate from the history
of form and interpretation
of meaning.
Yet it is not
only a different stage
of building that is highlighted,
but also different kinds
of building,
such as the variability
of function, as you see
on the plan on the lower right.
Now, this comes to the fore
if we look at screenshots
from an animation--
see on the upper left--
of the GIS database
that represents
the temporal scale
of daily changes
to the construction environment.
So this was
the initial animation that made
me think in a quite different
way.
The animation reveals how much
of the building activity
does not include
the few buildings out
of hundreds in this case
that had
some significant architectural
form, usually in the variation
of materials,
or, as in the entrance pavilion
here, some decorative details.
These buildings,
like the entrance pavilion
for Birkenau, that have been so
much the focus of any discussion
of the spaces of Auschwitz
recede into the background
of the sheer numbers
of buildings and building
activity
that surrounds them visualized
in the animation stills.
The use of the database
and large urban scale
visualization
highlight the buildings
in between, as it were,
as the major visual activity.
In this analysis, the production
of buildings is most important.
Such a focus and such a question
also links the activity
of local architects at Auschwitz
to the systemic dynamic
of the vast construction
activity endemic to the SS
concentration camp system
as a whole.
Thus, the granular scale
of the individual building
on the right
can be simultaneously
or relationally shown in terms
of its role
in the overall module
of the camp plan and in relation
to the overall system
of construction for the SS.
And I would point to also
how important
relationally relations are
to Hauser's analysis.
It is the expansive connection
between individual buildings
and imperial scale systems that
enable the ideological ambitions
of the SS
and form the daily experience
of the inmates, both visually
and in terms of forced labor.
As such, the vernacular
architecture of the barracks,
the potato storage hall,
the horse stall, the troops'
sauna facility, et cetera
becomes a new question
for research in terms
of its importance
both here and in the SS system
as a whole.
It is worth reminding ourselves
that the functional integration
of such buildings
into a coherent
ideological and political whole
was also a burning
historical concern
for this generation of Weimar
trained architects now
in a position of authority
within the SS.
In my argument,
the digital visualizations have
helped us to sharpen
our historical and geographic
questions about Auschwitz
and explore these
at different scales.
In particular, it sides
with those architectural
historians like Dell Upton,
for example, arguing for a more
complex understanding
of the built environment
as a whole, which includes
vernacular structures
in particular,
such as the sauna you see
on the right.
The visualization
of construction raises the need
for an analysis of the buildings
in between those most often
isolated
and studied in the world
of the SS
or in other architectural
histories.
Hence, the digital exploration
of the built environment
emphasizes different art
historical problems.
For example, the production
of the vernacular buildings
and spaces as a distinct art
historical field of study.
In this regard, Hauser gives us
a way in to thinking
about this digital mapping
in his emphasis
on systemic and relational
analysis.
This problem
is both familiar to art history,
but also one that introduces
new subjects, including
Auschwitz,
into the center of art
historical analysis.
Digital mapping has been part
of the research process
in our ongoing work
as much as digging
in the archive
or covering
the relevant secondary
literature.
In addition, we have argued
that certain problems of scale
are better suited
to digital visualizations.
Thousands of buildings
are more interesting to analyze
than a few canonical examples
when one uses mapping tools,
and in this case,
one might say it may be more
interesting to analyze the town
of Oak Ridge for Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill
than the Lever House in New
York, for example.
Like any method or condition
of scholarship,
certain critical questions
become more
important than others
as they are better suited
to such an analysis.
In particular, if we are going
to endorse digital art history,
we have to become
comfortable with valuing
scholarship that emphasizes
questions of process,
and we have to reacquaint
ourselves with those art
historical traditions that
emphasize systemic problems
of analysis,
as well as issues involving
large scale data.
Spatial exploration and mapping
methods are both suited
to explore exactly these sorts
of art historical questions.
In this regard, every discipline
and art historical subfield
has important and scalable
spatial questions.
The issue is defining
and debating what those are.
The shift in the material
conditions
of our own scholarly work
forces us to contend
with this situation to make
choices.
As with the built environment
of Auschwitz,
spatial visualizations
take the individual object out
of the center of analysis
and instead make the changing
vernacular environment
as a whole the real subject
of our study.
Of course, individual objects
survive in digital art history,
often as hypererratic works,
like this well known Ghent
Altarpiece project.
But more generally in mapping,
objects per se are not gone,
but they maintain their status
in the argument relationally
to socioeconomic and political
conditions of real consequence.
All art history-- indeed all
of society-- is, of course,
relations.
The point is not only
to understand this conceptually,
but also
in concrete circumstances
to show the critical capacity
of this social condition
to our analysis
as in the particular case
of the vernacular architecture
of Auschwitz.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Now we have time
for some questions or comments.
Just stay by the mic.
Yes, in the back there?
Two questions regarding what
you've just described.
One is, does your, for want
of a better term, archive
include temporary buildings that
were built for the purpose
of construction
and then destroyed?
And number two, are there cases
in what you've studied
of quote "temporary" buildings,
end quote, which in fact were
repurposed
after the construction was
complete?
Thank you, and that slide just
went, but both of your questions
are answered yes.
What really surprised me is when
I got into the SS archive--
oh thank you-- was how often
the architects themselves--
and I started from
the architects' point of view--
were thinking in at least three
different time signatures.
So this a plan drawn by the SS
that we've highlighted
certain functions.
These buildings-- these are
permanent structures.
That's the building
administration.
There are about 300 architects
working there.
These buildings, though, here--
these were all meant to be
temporary, but they were meant
to be temporary for a four year
period, and then we're going
to be replaced
by permanent housing
and, believe it or not,
a kindergarten.
So they were thinking--
and what you see-- this plan
shows you one time signature,
but in the overall plan,
it's palimpsestic.
You could see at the same time
the building that is being built
today, and then the building
underneath it, which will be
built after they've used
this building,
torn it down, and completed
the plan,
assuming a successful completion
to the war.
So they're thinking in almost
imperial terms.
We need to have these buildings
today, but we're also
simultaneously planning
for this permanent Germanic
future.
So in that sense,
the idea
of the temporary building
was the time scale that implies
was very much part
of their planning process
and their design process.
Now, in terms of repurposed,
that did not happen--
well, it happened frequently
for the inmates' part
of the camp.
It did not happen as often
for the SS part of the camp.
So these buildings up here,
for example, where you had
forced labor draftsman--
so we have architects who were
pressed into forced labor who
were drawing the thousands
of plans that you needed
to draw--
that was something that was
taken over
from other forced labor work,
and then in '44,
when the war was really turning
completely against obviously
the Nazi drive, they repurposed
them for other kinds
of forced labor activity.
Yes, here.
So the title of your talk
was "Putting the Research
Question First,"
but it seems that what is
intriguing to
me is that the really rich
question you ended up with you
found through--
you started with one question.
You worked your way
into building this resource,
and then you ended up finding
something that you had found
material to answer our question
you didn't necessarily know
was there.
Is question first or does
the question emerge in the --
Excellent point of contradiction
in my title.
I am very glad you pointed that
out, because one of the things I
wanted to say
was that the research question
was what we were
interested in the whole way
along
and that the mapping was part
of the process.
There are different kinds
of digital approaches.
There are people that really use
the digital environment
from the coding end and they're
really kind of thinking
through both the research
question
and the digital question.
From our particular approach,
it's more applying
digital tools, so we're not
coding here.
We're using
the digital visualization
process as a way of constantly
focusing on what is the research
question.
And so for us, what's
interesting is not necessarily
the map as an end result.
What's interesting for us is
that the research question
changed because of mapping.
So that was kind of where I was
trying to get.
That sounds great,
and it fits very
much with the sort
of hermeneutic and iterative
process of working
with all kinds of materials
in the humanities.
Joneath.
I'm very
interested in the structure
of this site.
In other words, issues that
might pertain to other projects.
I didn't quite understand.
Is this an open ended project?
You're talking about how
your research issues changed
over time, so do you see this
as a continuing project?
Will you continue to revise it?
And in terms of research
questions,
what about other people
who might be working
in related areas, their research
questions?
Is there a way built in in order
to open this up to links
or interests of other people
to aggregate work?
Thank you, yes.
What's happening now
is this is-- so this is phase
one, and there are five case
studies in the Holocaust
geography collaborative.
This is one of them.
This is the only one that
focuses specifically
on construction
because I'm the art historian,
but what we're trying to do now
is we're trying to actually go
back to that first research
question, which was
the individual laborer
in the space,
and so our next stage is to go--
we're going to try to map
the testimony of the USC Shoah
Foundation and also
other oral archives,
which is 51,000 plus--
and testimonies of very
difficult types of evidence.
It's memory work.
It's faulty.
It's inconsistent, and so how
do we approach that?
But how do we get
these individual stories there.
What's a good means of that?
And I say this
because the testimony project is
now starting to get other people
who have also been working
on corpus linguistics,
at looking at testimony
from a textual point of view as
opposed
to a spatial point of view.
Those people are starting
to come in and draw in,
so we're trying to build a more
open ended collaborative.
Holocaust studies is--
like any sub discipline,
there are points
of collaboration and points
of contention.
We do think that mapping,
though, is one way of linking
to what is becoming also
a broader interest in using
digital tools
to analyze testimony.
So I would say stay tuned,
but indeed it is expanding out.
Right here, and then Rob
in the back.
Hi, you mentioned the number
of escapes going up
during the period
of chaotic rebuilding and that
being your focus
on construction.
I was wondering if you've yet
had the ability to understand
more
about the specific experience,
let's say, of prisoners
and to the extent that they
might have been able to dodge
or subvert the controlling
classes because of that--
if it's at the level yet
of individual experience.
We've just started our work
with the testimony, which
is where you're going to find
this.
There are SS records
of the camp, but the SS didn't
really care as much, of course,
for the individual.
And so you would find someone
escaped, someone shot,
but no evidence about that.
So you get it through survivors,
people that actually managed
this.
One of the things that's really,
though, shocking to me
is that, even
in our initial pass
through the testimony,
construction is hiding
in plain sight.
People have worked
on these testimonies for years,
and years, and years, and years.
I cannot emphasize how much
of the activity, the daily life
is construction, and part
of that is also construction
as a means of survival.
Women trained as bricklayers--
it's not recorded
in the testimony
because no one thought that was
interesting,
but that's the way they
survived, but also hiding
through piles of building
materials.
So the built environment is
a different kind of component,
and at least
in our initial pass
at the testimony--
and again, we're really maybe 30
or 40 in of these three hour
testimonies, and we're very,
very initial--
I'm again shocked at how much
construction is part
of that survival, but also
punishment.
We don't want to be
romantic about this.
If a building environment is
changing, that also means you
can't predict where the person
that may harm you
is going to be the next day,
so that's another aspect.
I think just one more.
I think Rob had his hand up
there.
Paul, I think this is
a wonderful talk,
and these last remarks remind me
of the beginning of your talk
when you talked
about the origins
of this digital move,
or this digital turn,
and this digital thinking
modulely,
and how this digital humanities
was brought to bear
upon problems that were suited
to this way of working
with computers,
and I'm very much reminded
in thinking that way of that--
I'll probably get this wrong--
of this Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle, the notion
that the observer,
as they look at something,
affects the thing that's looked
at.
And it seems to me
in this last example you're
taking your digital techniques,
you're looking at this evidence,
and all of a sudden the evidence
shifts, and you show it
brilliantly in your paper here,
and all of a sudden construction
is--
nobody has seen it before,
but now you see it.
So the digital humanities
and the digital techniques
are very powerful.
They, of course, are changing
the evidence, and you're showing
us how the evidence has changed.
And your paper is showing this
as very meritorious.
Is there a way in which
the digital is changing
the evidence in a way that would
be falsifying it?
Heisenberg and physicists write
about how the observer,
and looking, and observing,
and physics distorts
the physical evidence.
Is that possible?
Could it
be
possible through
the digital humanities we could
be distorting the record
of the past?
I know it couldn't happen
with any of the projects
that the speakers are doing here
at our conference, but could we
possibly entertain that
in our discussions here?
I'll try to make this brief.
I absolutely would agree
with this question-- that is,
the trajectory of this question.
It reminds me, though,
in the '80s, particularly
in the history disciplines,
you saw this big debate
about quantitative history,
and it was the quantitative wars
in history
in which we talk
about fetishizing the evidence,
and fetishizing
statistical analysis,
and what does that really show.
The distortion of a map, which
every map is a distortion--
there's no such thing
as a undistorted map.
Every map is a distortion,
including your Google Maps.
And so how do you deal
with that?
I would step that back
a little bit.
One of our big problems
in Holocaust studies
and the way that this has been
developing as a field
since the early '60s
is that the vast majority
of documents are SS.
The archive, the text,
is perpetrator, and so,
unless we try to take
that information
and think about it
in different ways,
including visualization, which
it certainly does distort what
the SS wanted to do, but also
the nature of that document--
we purposely, for example, chose
these colors to be shockingly
contrasting
with this banal bureaucratic
plan.
Unless we do that,
we aren't going to be
able to think
about these environments
other than from the perspective
of the ideology of the SS
architect.
And so I would say that it is
actually a critical use
of visualization, realizing
the limitations--
hence, I say some buildings I
know exactly when they were
built. Other buildings,
I have to use my judgment
as a historian.
That's what we do--
but emphasizing that, not hiding
that.
Emphasizing that.
Emphasizing the choices
you make, and emphasizing
that what you're trying to do
is get beyond their perspective
to see a broader view, a more
total analysis.
It's only by "distorting" quote
unquote that archival base--
that is, I would say visualizing
it in a different way.
I would not use the word
distorting, but it does change
the document.
But visualizing it
in a different way
gets us to a broader picture
and a more total analysis
of what buildings do.
Paul, thank you very much.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
