Mapping Lives: The Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine

This chapter explores how digital life narrative projects, like the Amsterdam Diaries Time Machine, can help illustrate the complexity of human experience within and across people’s stories. This digital application brings together several diaries written by women in Amsterdam during World War II. Following annotation of references to people, organizations, dates, and places, and linking them through linked open data (LOD), the project enables the study of patterns within and across diaries. We examine how these datasets illustrate Amsterdam’s role in these women’s lives and daily wartime experiences. By combining urban history and life narrative studies, this interdisciplinary approach provides deeper insights into how historical Amsterdam was experienced and shaped by the women living in its urban spaces.