This week I first read Stephen Ramsay’s “Databases” in A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ramsay states that “databases are an ubiquitous feature of life in the modern age, and yet the most all-encompassing definition of the term ‘database’.” Database systems, and in particular computerized databases, have allowed digital humanists to compile mass amounts of information available for easy retrieval. After Ramsay’s work I then explored Emory University’s “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”. This eye-opening database has information on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is described as “[offering] researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history. After observing both of these works, my mind began to wander towards another unfortunate period history where people kept extremely detailed records of the movements, ages, deaths, etc. of their victims—the Holocaust.
During World War II, the Nazi’s kept meticulous records about their Holocaust victims. They kept track of every body, every murder, every age, location, and movement of each prisoner in their concentration camps. They treated the horrible acts they committed like a business operation, where everything had to be recorded down to the very last detail. When I went to Poland last spring, I saw first hand just how detailed and comprehensive these records actually are.
These documents were collected after the War, and allowed the public to discover not only the atrocities of what happened, but also enabled them to track the movements of their family members. Recently, my grandmother longed to find out where her extended family ended up after the War (her side of the family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY after World War I after feeling escalating resentment towards the Jews in Poland and Germany). To find out this information, she went to a Holocaust museum and searched through their databases for her family name. She discovered that the family members who did not make it out of Europe during the War perished in one of the concentration camps. Because the databases that organizations compiled from the Nazi’s extensive records, people today can discover what happened to their ancestors.
Works Cited:
Stephen Ramsay, “Databases,” in Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004)
Emory University, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database