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EHRI

European Holocaust Research Infrastructure

EHRI-ERIC supports the Holocaust research community. It provides access to dispersed Holocaust sources, and to tools that enable researchers to collaboratively work with such sources. It seeks to overcome one of the hallmark challenges of Holocaust research - the wide dispersal of sources across Europe and beyond, and the related fragmentation of Holocaust historiography. The access provided through EHRI-ERIC is vital for the innovation of Holocaust Studies and for the training of scholars. EHRI's training and user support programmes enable the next generation of researchers and collection specialists to acquire the skills they need to excel in the digital world.

Website EHRI

Infrastructure  and  User Services  

At the European level, EHRI developed a distributed infrastructure, consisting of both virtual and in-person services. The EHRI Virtual Observatory has at its heart the EHRI Portal that offers free and wide access to scientifically contextualised information about more than 380.000 archival units from more than 2.300 Holocaust-relevant institutions and collections from 60 countries. Other services in the EHRI Virtual Observatory are: the EHRI Edition platform, which offers free, online access to scholarly digital editions of Holocaust sources; the EHRI Document Blog, which contains visualisation, enhancement and contextualisation of Holocaust sources; the EHRI Massive Open Online Course and the EHRI Online Training Course which provide self-study and guided training opportunities; the EHRI Geospatial Repository which contains high-quality data about Holocaust-related places and spaces; and a Digital Analysis Tools Market. This portfolio of virtual access is complemented by a wider knowledge sharing infrastructure that offers mobility, knowledge transfer and physical access to resources and expertise. Such services include the Conny Kristel Fellowship Programme that grants researchers and collection specialists access to the facilities and resources of EHRI’s distributed partner network and a portfolio of training and networking opportunities. In addition, the Dutch national node EHRI-NL integrates Dutch services, facilities and archives, such as: NIOD collections, Oorlogsbronnen, Westerbork Digital and the Anne Frank Knowledge Bank. It has also organised three network meetings thus far, bridging the disparate worlds of research and archiving in a national context. 

Examples/description of the type of research  

The research areas that are of interest to EHRI-ERIC and EHRI-NL cross the disciplinary boundaries of various subjects, such as: history, digital humanities, Holocaust research, sociolinguistics and political sciences. Other than traditional research methods, mostly facilitated by access to archives, EHRI-NL defined its research areas of particular interest as follows: 

  1. (Social) network analysis, which involves the study of the intricate connections and social relationships among people and groups involved in the Holocaust and WW2; 
  2. Computer-assisted geospatial research, unravelling complex spatial relationships by applying Geographical Information Systems (GIS)-methodologies (e.g., visualisations, geotagging, etc.); 
  3. Surveying the archival landscape of WW2 and the Holocaust: critically evaluating what records (collections) are used in war- and Holocaust research, and what collections are existent but currently dispersed, overlooked or underused; 
  4. (Digital) archival accountability, which addresses important issues like selection bias, politics of digitisation, computational search and analysis opportunities and interoperability; 
  5. Historical-sociological approaches at scale, studying how central themes like collaboration, resistance, and the agency of victims can be systematically aligned with institutional and/or spatial contexts; 
  6. Linguistic approaches that shed light on how language practices intersect with broader societal changes, the uncertain and pressing circumstances of war and persecution or violence-induced mobility; 
  7. Analysing the destructive power of administration, thereby illustrating how legal, institutional, and bureaucratic frameworks of oppression operate and; 
  8. Serving as a platform to discuss the ethical handling of collections and data related to the Holocaust and WW2. 

All these angles of inquiry can also be found in EHRI-ERIC. 

How to access the infrastructure ? 

Users, user groups and capacity, EHRI’s access policy is wide, with the exception of in-person services where an excellence-based procedure determines the distribution of a scarce amount of seats. By sheer numbers, it is fair to say that >90% of the accesses is virtual. This however does not necessarily reflect the full story, as the level of involvement of a transnational access user is obviously higher, whereas a week of access only counts as one unit. To highlight the importance of both physical and virtual access, EHRI uses the slogan: “A human network – a digital infrastructure”.

Disciplines

Archaeology Computers and the humanities Cultural anthropology Geography / planning History Law Language and literature Sociology
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