#DHJewish 2021
Conference submission: Short paper format 

The Holocaust at Sea: Recovering Jewish maritime mobility through curated and dispersed metadata 
 The proliferation of digital data and technologies has radically transformed humanities scholarship. Whether in the development of mapping platforms for spatial history, or in crowdsourcing user-generated data to reveal patterns of political activism, pioneering digital interfaces have been, and continue to be, disrupters of seemingly secure narrative models of scholarship.   

Digital innovation has also influenced Holocaust studies research directions and include platforms for accessing Holocaust and genocide survivor testimony, aggregated portals of globally dispersed archives such as EHRI, and (limited) dissemination websites of the archive of the International Tracing Service. These curated repositories are in addition to important digitally driven initiatives to restore and share Yiddish archives in cultural institutions such as YIVO, the Center for Jewish History, and the JDC. These innovations have advanced the rediscovery and rewriting aspects of modern Jewish history, particularly in its traumatic Holocaust epoch. These initiatives also have contributed to new sub fields, such as ‘Holocaust geographies’, digital testimony studies, and teaching apps which embed user-driven cartographic and testimonial interactivity.  

The recent data-driven approach to Holocaust studies has, furthermore, re-energized a field and consolidated a shift from Western European to Central and Eastern European geographies through the application of forensic methods and GIScience. The advances made by digital methods, tools, and datasets have prioritised the terra firma of the Holocaust, but not so much as to completely neglect its maritime intersections. These studies have not sufficiently integrated the work of generations of scholars who were so attuned to tracking Jewish wartime journeys from Europe to Palestine via the Mediterranean, what David Abulafia calls ‘the great sea’. How can digital tools and the building of metadata from dispersed data sources contribute to mapping the Holocaust at Sea in its interconnectedness and contingent human flow? Which conceptual influences can inform or constrain the ethical visualization of multi-scaled maritime mobility?  

These questions, and the digital practice previously outlined, have inspired the basis of a collaborative and multidisciplinary project, ‘The Holocaust at Sea: Recovering Jewish maritime mobility through curated and dispersed metadata’. Led by historians (including the paper’s author) in the United Kingdom, and with additional collaboration from scholars in geography, media arts, and law, and alongside practitioners in heritage industry and maritime museums in Baltic Sea countries (Denmark) and the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean Seas (Turkey, Greece, Italy, Israel), this early-stage project intends to learn from current-day practice in interactive storytelling of forced migration as a lens to frame the representation of Jewish refugees on the move in foot-land-sea migratory journeys, delayed and obstructed in these maritime regions, and their islands and port cities, particularly from 1941 to 1944. Furthermore, we examine the quantitative and qualitative elements needed to build new datasets of Jewish maritime mobility that are held in existing local and digitised repositories (whether in the ITS, JDC, or EHRI, in addition to extracting and documenting this mobility’s entangled moral economies).  
As this project is in its early stages, the paper offered at the conference will be conceptual. It will consider the opportunities posed by the ‘blue humanities’, an aqueous model emancipated from the earth and its land-based rhetoric, to thinking through the possibilities and constraints of ‘the digital’ as a de-territorializing method in visualizing geographically distant yet interlinked maritime patterns of traumatic and often impermanent Jewish movement. Finally, the paper will argue that a polyphonic narrative on Jewish mobility histories can be recovered through a deep dive into the boundless data flow of the sea and the multidirectional journeys of its refugee voyagers.

The Holocaust at Sea: Recovering Jewish maritime mobility through curated and dispersed metadata

The international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age will bring together more than 60 scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies. The conference is organised by the [Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH).](https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/) 

[For more information, and a PDF download of the program, please see also here.](https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/events/dhjewish-jewish-studies-digital-age) 



In order to meet other participants and for informal chats in the breaks, join us in our [wonder.me room](https://www.wonder.me/r?id=73a12756-8d93-4871-9374-143253bfbf59).