Encyclopedic database design for digital research: possibilities and challenges of developing a comprehensive database of Nazi-era camps for foreign forced laborers

Abstract

This article details the scholarly goals and conceptual and methodological challenges the authors encountered when developing an encyclopedic database to document the largest subset of Nazi-era camps—specifically the more than thirty-eight thousand labor camps for foreign civilian forced laborers estimated to have operated in Nazi Germany. Designed as a digital research tool, the database will serve as a companion to the forthcoming The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. 7, Camps for Foreign Forced Laborers. Previous volumes in the series synthesize foundational information about persecutory sites and inmate experiences into historical narratives for reference purposes. The database builds on this approach while presenting relevant information as carefully defined quantitative, qualitative, and temporal data extracted directly from primary and secondary sources for large-scale computational analysis. This article illustrates strategies for integrating the database with a traditional reference series while using digital methods to collect and standardize large-scale historical data. Challenges include extracting reliable data from primary and secondary sources that are frequently incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. To combat these issues, the project team follows a three-step process, guided by elaborate data-entry conventions, that includes (1) building a database that documents quantitative, temporal, geographic, and name information; (2) interpreting qualitative information while documenting, rather than resolving, conflicts between sources; and (3) sorting the data into the database schema of a relational PostgreSQL database. The authors demonstrate the database's potential to generate innovative scholarship by featuring a distinct subset of regional data. Thus, this article reveals how digital analysis can yield meaningful statistical and spatial analyses of the Nazi forced labor camps beyond individual case studies, which have long figured as the most promising access points in the historiography.