The Visual History Archive of the Shoa Foundation Institute at the University of Southern California Takes the Next Step into Teaching and Research
The Visual History Archive (VHA) contains 52,000 video testimonies from victims and witnesses of the Holocaust. Filmed in 56 countries in 32 languages, it is the world’s largest online video archive of testimonial interviews. With an average length of two-and-a-half hours, the interviews comprise a total of 120,000 hours of film. The video material has been digitalised and indexed and is accessible on the Web. The cataloguing and indexing allow fast searching and navigation. By using the various search mechanisms, users are able to access not only the resulting testimonies but also exact locations within the testimonies.
http://www.vha.fu-berlin.de/
Collecting Memories – The Establishment of the Shoah Foundation
During the filming of “Schindler’s List” in the Polish city of Krakow, many Holocaust survivors spoke of their wish to tell their story in front of the camera as well. Motivated by this, Steven Spielberg initiated a project for the documentation of testimony reports by survivors of the Holocaust. For this purpose, he set up the non-profit organisation "Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation" (Shoah Foundation) in 1994. Its goal was to videotape the stories told by the survivors in order to make these chronicles available to coming generations as teaching material and for educational purposes.
In an unparalleled effort, the foundation recorded over 52,000 testimonies and witness interviews in 56 countries and in 32 languages. In the following years, the Shoah Foundation viewed, indexed and filed the collected film material, with a runtime of about 120,000 hours, in order to archive it on digital data storage media later. With the Visual History Archive, the worldwide largest historical video archive was created.
Sharing History – The Shoa Foundation’s Educational Efforts
In 2006, the Shoah Foundation became part of the University of Southern California (USC), and the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education was founded. After the completion of the interview phase and the archiving, the Institute’s main focus has become the provision of the collected material for research and teaching purposes. The organisation’s purpose is educational and based on the assumption that telling stories is an essential and effective instrument to pass on memories and to promote tolerance. The aim is to give a voice to the few remaining survivors and to preserve these testimonies for posterity. Concurrently, numerous educational programmes have taken place and instructional materials have been created.
In addition, the Institute provides the high-quality archive to a number of university cooperation partners. By cooperating with the Shoah Foundation Institute, the Freie Universität is the first European university to afford its students, teachers and researchers access to the VHA. In doing so, the Freie Universität is not only taking up the topic of the growing significance of digital archives for universities, but is also establishing these as a fundamental and innovative component of both research and teaching.
Creating Opportunities – The Use of VHA in Teaching and Research
The VHA’s documentation of the survivors’ testimonies supports teaching with powerful audiovisual imagery and more direct, more personal access to the history of the National Socialist era. The term “visual history” can be understood as a historical, hermeneutic method for the production and editing of oral and visual sources, but one that goes yet further. With the multitude of archived interviews and the possibility of a differentiated search by a wide variety of criteria and categories, the VHA opens up numerous new perspectives for research and provides access to previously unavailable materials. For example, in their testimonies, survivors have corroborated each other’s reports about hitherto undocumented camps.
For the Freie Universität, working with the VHA opens up new possibilities of developing and advancing interdisciplinary research approaches and methods. The VHA can easily be integrated into research approaches, such as the concept of the "Visual Turn" that has recently been postulated and applied in various social sciences. One such attempt is the inclusion of the visual and aesthetic in a historical analysis.
Further insight into the e-learning opportunities presented by the VHA will be offered by Dr. Doris Tausendfreund of the Freie Universität’s Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) during her talk entitled Visual Archives in Education & Research: The Shoah Visual History Archive. It is part of the Online Educa Berlin session “Using Video to Support Online Learning” (VID75), taking place on Friday, November 30, 16:30 - 18:00.
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