The Future of the Past: Analyzing Early Holocaust Testimonies with Digital Tools

EHRI Webinar | 25 September 2024 | 3:00 PM CET | On Zoom

with Ildikó Barna 

In 2021, we started the research project “Revisiting Early Testimonies of Hungarian Jewish Holocaust Survivors through a Digital Lens” (in short, “Digital Lens”) at the Research Center for Computational Social Science (RC2S2), ELTE University, Budapest. The basis of our research is reliant on the database of the National Relief Committee for Deportees (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság, DEGOB), which committee recorded more than 3,600 protocols between 1944 and 1946 in Budapest referencing to more than 5,000 survivors just returning from deportation. The DEGOB material we examine bases our inquiry on oral history, yet we approach our research questions with digital humanities tools, namely through computational history methodology.

The project aims to analyze the DEGOB protocols using innovative methods, such as automated text analysis, artificial intelligence, and visualizations, in addition to traditional qualitative and quantitative methods. The project delineates three directions of research that are related to the language of the Holocaust, the gendered experiences of survivors, and the topography of persecution.

The webinar “The Future of the Past: Analyzing Early Holocaust Testimonies with Digital Tools” will discuss the key aspects of the “Digital Lens” project, beginning with an overview of our research approach and highlighting the most significant findings. It will focus on selected results that showcase the innovative use of methodologies. Furthermore, it will explore the challenges, limitations, and lessons learned throughout the project, offering insights into both the difficulties encountered and the knowledge gained from employing digital humanities tools to analyze Holocaust testimonies.

Ildikó Barna

Ildikó Barna is a sociologist. She is an Associate Professor at ELTE University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Social Research Methodology, Budapest. She is the co-director of the Research Center for Computational Social Science (RC2S2). Her research topics include post-Holocaust studies, quantitative and natural language processing (NLP) research on historical data and archival sources, antisemitism, and memory politics. Dr. Barna has been awarded numerous research grants, including the MTA Bolyai János Research Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2017–2020). She has also held several prestigious fellowships, such as the Visiting Research Fellowship at the Malach Centre for Visual History in Prague (2020), the International Teaching Fellowship, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research (2018–2019) the EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship at the Arolsen Archive and Wiener Holocaust Library (2017), and the Visiting Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (2015). She is the author of numerous publications and, together with her co-authors, received the Károly Polányi Prize from the Hungarian Sociological Association in 2003, 2017, and 2023 for the best publication of the previous year.

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The webinar is free and no registration is required.

Topic: EHRI Webinar
Time: Sep 25, 2024 03:00 PM Prague Bratislava

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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81894438482?pwd=efAoC3karyJgQKWtmKX6tZUncAoHPy.1

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