This week I chose to look at the ReVilna mapping project. The project compiles an account of what life was like in the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, Lithuania from its creation in 1943 up until its liquidation two years later. It uses over 200 sources from memoirs, archives, and documents and matches them to photographs to tell a story with an interactive map.
In Maps Are Territories, Turnbull explains how Cartesian maps are functional and allows one to analyze points of interest. This map was likely created from the perspective of someone with prior knowledge of this event such as a historian. The way the map is divided into sections suggests that the creator had a clear sense of what they were looking for in order to put together this narrative.
This digital mapping project attempts to not only provide the user with relevant information about the ghetto, but also attempts to truly show the type of environment and living situations that residents of the ghetto were in. The interactive “Choose a Story” option is a crucial feature that gives users the option of selecting the part of the story which they choose to explore. The project’s detail and easy-to-use interface makes it understandable for any viewer, but the project contains very little besides the map itself. It assumes that users have background knowledge of Jewish ghettos and World War II. I think a bit more context on either the home page or a separate page could be useful. Nevertheless, the creator of the map does a powerful job 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.
It would be interesting to see how to a comparison between the Vilnius ghetto and others around Europe. The project reveals the surprising richness of day-to-day life, including details about governance, education, sports, and theater. I wonder if this information was especially unique to Vilnius or not.
Unfortunately, the map obscures specific details of how the streets and buildings looked. There are some pictures in the gallery of specific buildings and the streets. However, a better interactive map would ideally be one that allows a user to not only view the map from a birds-eye view but also to “be on the street,” just as Google maps has done. I’m not entirely sure if this type of information is available but this would be a great way to improve the digital map, even if it was just in certain places on map.
I like how this map uses photos and documents to reveal “the surprising richness of day-to-day life”–something the map I looked at, Digital Harlem, also sought to do. I also thought that one area the maps are lacking is the sensation of being on the street. I think one way to capture this would be through 3D reconstruction, like the Rome Reborn project has done (http://romereborn.frischerconsulting.com/).