The War Crimes Documentation Initiative (WCDI) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Abstract

The War Crimes Documentation Initiative (WCDI) is a digital humanities laboratory led by a team of historians, librarians, and GIS specialists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa since the spring of 2019. WCDI seeks to experiment, develop, and make available to a broad audience innovative digital resources that help promote the teaching and research of World War II-era war crimes committed by the Japanese in the Asia-Pacific region (1931-1945). WCDI uses geographic information systems (GIS) and graph analysis to document, across space and time, the nexus between Japanese military operations, government and military power structures, and the patterns of war crimes. WCDI’s objective is to make available to students and scholars across the globe digital tools that empower users to discover, analyze, and assess the Japanese conduct of war and military occupation, and find answers to a number of questions on accountability that remain unresolved to this day. In this seminar, the WCDI team introduces its digital resources to the UH CJS community.