About
Digital History Consulting has grown into full operation since 2017. It fills the gap between high demand for substantive digital history research and the hesitation of historians to integrate digital methods into their research. Digital History Consulting pushes the historical research community as a whole to normalize digital research as a common part of historical research.
Justus Hillebrand, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and the director of Digital History Consulting, Inc.
I received my doctorate in History from the University of Maine in co-tutelage with the University of Cologne in 2021. In my graduate work, I received formal training in database management and geographic information systems (GIS) and applied these skills in several historical research projects. For my dissertation „To Know the Land with Hands and Minds: Negotiating Agricultural Knowledge in Late-Nineteenth-Century New England and Westphalia“, I used digital mapping and visualization of historical data to learn more about farm families who did not leave written historical sources.
In my work with the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, I have developed relational database designs, written rules for data entry, trained team members, and mapped data in GIS since 2016. I have co-published with Dr. Anne Knowles and other Collaborative members in the International Journal for Humanities and Arts Computing.
Since 2019, I have been working as a contractor with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Applied Research Division on the development of a large-scale relational database for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Volume VII: Camps for Foreign Forced Laborers.
I also wrote about the connections between these projects to make the digital humanities more accessible for historians.