Eastern Front ArcGIS Mapping

As I conducted dissertation research on the self-understanding of German soldiers during the Second World War, I quickly ran into a problem.  I had decided to follow the experiences of roughly 30 individuals, but since they fought in many different areas of the Eastern Front and were often transferred from one region to another, I found it difficult to keep track of where each man was and what he was doing at a given point in time.  After joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison Digital Humanities Research Network in 2015, I solicited advice from colleagues in Computer Science and other disciplines, and decided to utilize the GIS program ArcGIS to create detailed maps to track each soldier’s movements over time.  First, I combed thousands of pages of sources and an online database to determine each man’s location at specific points in time, and then used an external website to geolocate the data, fitting it to precise GPS coordinates within ArcGIS.  I then used ArcGIS’ Timeline feature to create a time slider that allows the user to choose a day and see where each individual was at that time.  Finally, I used the Animation feature to create animated videos displaying the movements of all the soldiers over the course of the four-year campaign.  Doing so helped provide important geographical context for my writing and allowed for useful comparisons between soldiers.

In 2016, I wrote an article describing the mapping project and how it evolved over time in the digital magazine Edge Effects to help other researchers learn about the potential of this approach. The article can be found here.