Adam Rudy
4/7/16 HUM 560: Digital Humanities Dr. Angello “The Fallen of WWII: Visualization to Emphasize the Reality of the Devastation of World War II” As a historian it’s natural to have a certain intrigue when talking about war. After all they are typically central to the process of political history. Nations are formed, destroyed, enlarged and torn apart by wars. Yet, it has become apparent that as a society we have become desensitized to violence and warfare. Children grow up playing first person shooters for hours a day and see war with a glamour almost. Death, carnage and the sheer gore of war is something that has become overlooked in my opinion. However, Neil Halloran’s interactive documentary, “The Fallen of WWII”, that examines the human costs of World War II and the decline of battle deaths since the war does an incredible job of displaying the magnitude of this war in a visually engaging manner. It’s one thing to write that seventy million people died during the war. Its another entirely to visually display it in a way that is utterly eye opening. This documentary is a fantastic example of how a digital element to a humanities project can truly take the scholarship to another level. Halloran utilizes graphes, interactive displays, sounds and skillful narration to portray an eye opening look into the utter devastation that was the second world war. The project was first published in 2015 and has since went on to win numerous awards such as the SXSW Winner for Interactive Innovation, Vimeo best of 2015 and the 2016 Award for Best American Infographic. Halloran has chosen to run an interactive website as well as publish the video on YouTube and Vimeo. The flexibility of viewing options is one of the major selling points about this project. Teachers can embed his video to their own sites and seamlessly integrate it into their instruction. Many of my students mouths began to drop as they watched the visualization show just how massive the number of people that died from the Soviet Union during the war. There is a suggested ticket price of 2.50 on the website, but it’s only suggested. You can also donate larger financial resources of twenty five or one hundred dollars and be listed as a Gold and Silver Supporter of the project in the credits. Below that option Halloran has put a brief paragraph explaining the any donated money intends on going towards his next project exploring more of the trends of war and peace and drones terrorism and democracy. If that project turns out to be anything like this one, he will certainly have to get a larger shelf for his future awards. “The Fallen of WWII” uses a linear narration that allows the viewer to pause and interact with the charts used in the fifteen minute data visualization. Although Halloran is primarily responsible for the project, he did give credit to this collaborators who helped make the project possible. Halloran’s portion of work appears to be herculeon as he wrote, directed, coded and narrated the project. He was assigned by Andy Dollerson on the music and sound design as well as receiving editorial feedback and technical consulting from AlteredQualiea. Halloran and Dollerson have combined to make a ground breaking project that beautifully illustrates the tragedy of WWII. The website also lists that “most of the underlying sources are similar to WWII Casualties Wikipedia Articles” sources. This is a perfect example of taking already existing data but displaying it in a totally new and engaging way. One final note about the website itself is that Halloran has provided a comments section for his viewers to leave their thoughts, ideas and feedback. The comment section was originally listed right below the video, however it has generated so much buzz that it actually is it’s own separate page now. There are close to fifteen hundred comments with some real thoughtful discussion. One comment that really caught my eye actually holds quite a bit of irony for the whole project. A post from “Writzer” wrote, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” Writzer’s contribution was great in a number of ways, but the great irony is that Joseph Stalin is responsible for that quote. The brutal leader of the Soviet Union was responsible for millions of deaths, but his quote really puts the context of the project into a new light. As a US history teacher we constantly throw around statistics of casualties and deaths, but often do not pause to truly reflect on that fact that all of those people were brothers, sons, fathers, daughters, mothers, grandmothers and so much more. Although Halloran opens up his video by stating that this project isn’t about individual people, but that masses of deaths in WWII. It still forced me to think about just how tragic of an event this really was. The fifteen minute documentary starts by explaining that the average lifespan of an American is eighty years and that an eighty year old today would have been ten when World War Two ended and four when it started. Meaning a soldier would have to be at least eighty nine years old today to have seen combat during the War. Most of the decision makers of the war have since passed away. However this documentary is not about them or individuals, instead it’s about the millions who lives were cut short by the war. To represent those people, Halloran used one tiny person to symbolize one thousand deaths. To begin the visualization he starts by discussing military deaths in the European theater of the war. This is followed by civilians and then the pacific theater. As the visualization begins the viewer will notice a subtle clicking for every person that is displayed on the bar graph and timeline combination that is being created. This does a great job of really emphasizing how many people died in this conflict. By starting with American deaths, he shows that 400,000 Americans lost their lives, most of which was over fighting the Nazi’s. However, there were very high casualty rates at the end of the pacific theater against Japan. As Halloran is narrating he also puts much of the fighting in perspective. He throws in little tidbits about parts of the war. For example he explains that this is a drastic increase of American deaths on D-Day as 2,500 Americans died that day, which is just as many as the entire thirteen year war in Afghanistan in the early twenty first century. This really opens the viewer's eyes to the magnitude of the war. From there the visualization moves to Europe where it begins with all the countries that Hitler invaded to start WWII. Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Greece, Yugoslavia and Denmark are all shown to have hundreds of thousands of deaths. This is quickly follows by the United Kingdom and then German Military Deaths. Although Germany lost relatively few troops in their initial conquest, their bar begins to grow rather rapidly as they start factoring in the military deaths on the Eastern front. The German tower starts climbing well over all the other countries already listed. That is until the USSR is considered. The red soviet bar begins to climb and climb and climb with the subtle clicking of each person sounding very similar to a machine gun. As the tower continues to sour way about every other tower the viewer begins to hear the wind blowing as if you were atop of a skyscraper. You even begin to question if the tower will ever stop. Eventually the bar stops, only then to display 8.7 million military deaths for the Soviets. However some argue that those estimates are low and that number could be as high as 14 million. After this the visualization zooms out for a bit to show the comparison between all the countries in the European theater and if then thrown onto a timeline so you can see and interact with the data from the various times that each country was losing soldiers. Finally all the data is added together to visualize twenty two million military deaths. The next portion of the documentary focuses on civilian deaths. After all they were significantly higher in this war than in previous wars for many reasons. Halloran starts off by discussing the Holocaust and the six million jews that were killed. This is followed by a bar graph similar to before that is breaking down and moving all the deaths by country and concentration camp. Then the non jewish deaths in the concentration camp are factored in. The Roma, Disabled, catholics, prisoners or war and the two million non jewish poles that were killed during the Holocaust are all included on the interactive timeline. At this point in the documentary Halloran throws in another anecdote about sixteen percent of the total polish population died during WWII, the highest percentage of any country. However the country with the highest number of deaths easily goes to the Soviets. Once again their bar steadily climbs as the narration explains the civilian deaths at Leningrad because of starvation and then more due to Stalin’s own cruelty to his own people. The Soviet total settles at an estimation between ten and twenty million civilian deaths. Halloran also explains that the majority of civilian deaths were no accident as hundred of thousands were caused by bombing of cities and fighting in highly populated areas. After this, the viewer is given another opportunity to step back and interact with the data as both the European military and civilian data is morphed into one giant bar graph totaling forty one million deaths in Europe during WWII. The first twelve minutes of the documentary focus on the European theater of the war, which could be a shortfall of this project as it somewhat hurries through the pacific theater of the war. Nevertheless it still does a good job displaying the date in the same way as he did with Europe. Halloran starts by using military deaths and emphasizing that China and Japan had the majority of military deaths. He then breaks it down by other countries that were invaded such as the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina (modern day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), the Philippines, Korea and India. One unique part of this portion of the documentary is that the bar graph has flipped and is now counting down. That way at the end of the documentary the European and Pacific graphs can be connected on one major scale. As the visualization continues it is noted that China had the second highest death count after the USSR and too allowed many of their own civilians to be harmed. During the war the Chinese government purposefully allowed the dyke of the Yellow River to flood hoping to slow down the advancing Japanese army. In turn this killed half a million chinese. Halloran again puts this into perspective showing that this was more than triple of the number of people killed during the 2004 Asian Tsunami’s. At this point in the documentary the Asian and European theaters data is combined into one colorful visualization that shows WWII was responsible for the death of over seventy million people. This is more than any other war in history. To add to his claims, Halloran compared his data to the number of people that died during some of the worst atrocities on record such as the Atlantic slave trade, 30 years war, Fall of the Ming Dynasty, World War One and the brutal rule of Stalin and Mao. All these number are dwarfs in comparison to the WWII numbers. Only when adjusted by the percentage of the world population that was killed at the time do the numbers start to compare to the WWII rates. It should also be noted that many of those events lasted for centuries whereas the war only lasted for six years. This marks the end of the first version of the project. After its initial completion Halloran added some additional information and visualization on post war conflicts from 1946 to 2010. What we see if that we are undergoing what has been called the “Long Peace.” Even with the collapse of the Cold War era tension between the US and USSR we have still not seen any major conflict. Since World War II no European countries have fought one another and the largest forty four economics in the world have not fought each other at all. He then breaks down several of the small wars that have happened as Colonial, Interstate, Civil and Civil with foreign intervention. Creatively here Halloran explains that peace is a rather difficult thing to measure, but if we look at the numbers it’s clear that we are enjoying a time of relative peace and if watching the news every night depresses us, many seeing the numbers should give us hope. “The Fallen of WWII” is a wonderful example of how a digital element can add an entirely new level of scholarship to a project. Hundreds of thousands of books have been written about the horrors that were the second world war, but none has been able to display the devastation in such as way as this project. It is a great example of how the humanities combined with digital know how can really enhance scholarship. Properly cited Google Doc
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