Project title: Broken Gravestones: Tracing Remnants of Concentration Camps in the 1899-1902 South African War
Project description: This summer, I worked on a research project analyzing a database of records of people who were in concentration camps during the South African War from 1899 to 1902. The database was a small fraction of the over 100,000 Boer civilians that were forced into concentration camps as part of the British Empire’s “scorched earth” policy. I created histograms from the cleaned data to identify patterns and found several significant trends. Working with this database and the gravestone images made the concentration camps and the people who were in them seem less distant. Having graphical representations of the dataset is one way to see the cost that everyday people paid in the South African War, linking the gravestones with names and stories of individuals is another way.