reVilna is a digital mapping project that focuses on how the residents of the Vilnius Ghetto lived during World War II. It uses over 200 sources from memoirs, archives, and documents and matches them to photographs to tell a story with an interactive map.
The map is divided into nine sections called “Stories”: Formation of Ghetto, Aktionen, Judenrat, Health and Education, Life in the Ghetto, Art and Culture, Resistance and the FPO, End of the Ghetto, and All Events and Places. The map uses a chronological storyline approach to navigate users through the various parts of the map. Users have to the choice to start from the beginning of the narrative and let the site navigate them throughout, or to explore the map on her/his own.
The map reveals a lot about the conditions of the Vilnius Ghetto and tries to show a more positive light about the unfortunate circumstance of being forced to live in the Ghetto by discussing the arts, culture, education, and health resources that was provided to the residents. While the map does discuss the positive aspects the Ghetto had, it inevitably is forced to discuss the formation and liquidation (moving the Jewish people to concentration camps) of the Ghetto which reinforces the situation to viewers about what it actually stood for: the mass discrimination and massacre against Jewish people. The map adds a different understanding to the narrative of Jewish lives in Ghettos during World War II. It adds some knowledge for people who would have never thought it was possible that Jewish people were allowed some type of “normal” aspects to their daily lives.
The creator of the map does a powerful in telling the story of how the Jewish people in the ghetto lived and functioned, despite the grave conditions they lived under, and discussing the drastically unfortunate end of the Ghetto. The project does a profound job at telling the story of the Ghetto; however, the map itself was not so significant as, besides knowing the location of the ghetto and placements of places within the ghetto, there was no heavy geographical data. It seemed insignificant to have just have a map in the background when navigating through the narrative. Personally, I forgot that I was even looking at a map at all when going through each section of the project. I feel as though focusing more on a timeline visualization would have benefited this project more as it tells a story in a chronological order.