Abstract
In 1979 the Holocaust Survivors Film Project began videotaping Holocaust survivors. Since then, its successor, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, has recorded and preserved testimonies for decades. Having completed a large-scale digitization of the entire collection, the archive has pivoted to increasing digital access. As part of its transition to a fully digital archive, it has developed a web-based digital anthology. This anthology, titled Let Them Speak, allows researchers to study circa 3000 interviews from three collections: Fortunoff Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and USC Shoah Foundation. While digitization has helped alleviate one concern, long-term preservation, and opened new means of access, it raises several new challenges, technical, curatorial, and ethical. This chapter will elucidate some of these challenges.
Both authors contributed equally to this chapter. The authors have joint responsibility for the last concluding section. Of the six sections in this chapter, Stephen Naron is primarily responsible for the first three and Gabor Mihaly Toth has primary responsibility for the latter three.
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- 1.
See, for instance, Hartmann (2002, 134).
- 2.
See, for instance, USC, SHOAH VA, 1400, USC SHOAH VA 7415, USHMM RG-50.544∗0001.
- 3.
One example is the launch of the Archive’s Critical Edition Series, which takes a testimony, transcribes and translates it, and asks a scholar to provide commentary on the content of the testimony, describing terms, events, providing context, and suggestions for further reading on complex subjects.
- 4.
For a more detailed history of the collection, see Rudof (2012).
- 5.
For a comparison of interview methodologies employed by organizations dedicated to recording Holocaust testimony, see Shenker (2015).
- 6.
Interviewers quickly discovered that too many questions interrupt the flow of memory, often causing the witness to become passive and simply wait for the next question rather than continue the type of free association that reveals much more of the individual’s life story.
- 7.
Information about the early history of the HSFP can be gleaned from the papers documenting the organization’s establishment, growth, and deposit at Yale in 1982. See the archival finding aid here: https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/3916
- 8.
BlackLab has been developed by the Institute for the Dutch Language; it allows complex searches in linguistically annotated textual data. For further information see, http://inl.github.io/BlackLab/
- 9.
The three collections shared not only transcripts and some audio/video recordings, but also catalogue data, which have been post-processed and inserted into a database empowering Let them Speak. The harmonization of the complete meta-data was not possible; only a selected set of meta-data is therefore available to search testimonies.
- 10.
CQL was developed in the 1990s at the University of Stuttgart; since then it has been implemented to search important corpora such as the British National Corpus. It is available in corpus engines such as BlackLab, SketchEngine, and The IMS Open Corpus Workbench.
- 11.
Of course, librarians and archivists have already “made peace” with this dilemma long ago, since testimonies and collections related to the Holocaust are regularly assigned call numbers and shelfmarks. Even the Fortunoff Archive provides each testimony with an HVT#, or Holocaust Video Testimony number. A necessary compromise, perhaps, to ensure intellectual control of the collection and enable research.
- 12.
See Rosen (2010).
- 13.
The computing part of this research is being discussed in Toth (2020).
- 14.
See Flynn (2017).
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Naron, S., Toth, G.M. (2020). Let Them Speak: An Effort to Reconnect Communities of Survivors in a Digital Archive. In: Zucker, E., Simon, D. (eds) Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39395-3_4
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