ABSTRACT
Due to a Nazi proclivity to record medical examinations, deportations, and executions—as well as a general post-war effort to record survivor testimonies—the Holocaust is extraordinarily well documented. In this chapter, I demonstrate how quantitative and computational frameworks can aid scholarly study of this sensitive subject matter. A quantitative (or “numerate”) approach is useful to extract and contextualize meaning regarding past events, make predictions, and identify temporal and geographic patterns. These methodological approaches and epistemological lenses can also reveal completely new relationships and patterns among variables. Further, by leveraging advanced computer algorithms and statistical tests, scholars can collect and process data on a larger universe of cases, as these tools are designed to improve “big data” analytics. Given a numerate analysis of individual and collective tragedy, this chapter concludes with an ethics-based discussion of consent, survivorship, and selection biases, and prohibition moral dilemma. Practiced carefully, these results could accelerate the field of genocide studies, and its related subdisciplines of conflict, ethnic violence, and identity politics studies.
