Let Them Speak
Reviewed by: Theodore Daniel Manning & Kristy Leonardatos
Review started: March 13, 2023
Review last updated: May 7, 2023
Site Link
Data and Sources
- Testimonies of Shoah survivors in written, video, and audio format
- Visualized tree of testimonial fragments
- Linguistic corpus of testimonies, which is searchable via a database
- Sourced from In Search of the Drowned, which contains testimonies from the Yale Fortunoff Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation, and the Visual History Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Processes
- Text mining, using a pipeline method described here.
- Corpus underwent tokenization, sentence splitting, linguistic annotation, and detection of multiword expressions.
- Documented frequency of various parts of speech, identified those recurrent, and used an embedded word model to detect synonyms.
- Topic modeling was used to show when a synonym set is occurring.
- Supervised analysis where the topic words and recurrence was checked and collected testimony contexts were gathered together.
- Repeated with fragments.
Presentation
- Corpus searchable by either simple search or Corpus Query Language.
- A tree of words from testimonial fragments.
Digital Tools Used
- Docker application, Alpine Linux distribution and server, Javascript, BlackLab and server, REST interface (powered by Apache Tomcat), Mongo database, React/Redux Javascript framework, Python Flask, D3J.
Languages
- English
Review
Let Them Speak is a digitization of testimonies from Shoah survivors from three different archives in the United States (Yale, USC, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). It is an ongoing project between Yale and USC with funding coming from the two schools, and is authored primarily by Gabor Mihaly Toth with the help of unnamed students and volunteers in gathering the statements, in collaboration with the Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory. It is, in part, a passion project, being created to give voices to the victims of the Holocaust, illustrating their experiences. Exact start date of the project is unclear, although it seems to be such a long ongoing project that perhaps the true start date is unknown. Although there is no social media presence of this project, its three collaborators are so well known for this sort of research it is perhaps unnecessary.
This project is deeply stirring and beautifully and usefully presented. It is written from an explicitly Jewish perspective, words like kaddish and Shoah being used without explanation for non-Jews throughout the project, further showing the project’s dedication to preserving statements from Shoah survivors from a Jewish angle that preserves the emotions, rather than just the events themselves. The project includes essays presented often in video form, and some in text, written by Gabor Mihaly Toth about the reasons for the project, the current epistemologies surrounding this study, and also including interviews from survivors.
The following paragraph was written by my project partner for this review, Kristy Leonardatos, as the material was too difficult for me to look at as a Jewish person.
Let them Speak is well-designed and easy to navigate, allowing users to search the archive by a variety of criteria, including the name of the interviewee, geographic location, and keywords. The website also provides useful contextual information about the interviews, such as biographical information about the interviewees and the historical context in which the interviews were conducted. Another notable feature of this project is its commitment to accessibility. The website is available in multiple languages, including English, Hebrew, German, and Russian, which makes it more accessible to a wider range of users. The website also includes transcripts and closed captions for the videos, which can be helpful for users who have difficulty hearing or understanding spoken language.
The website includes a testimonies page which comprises a collection of 2681 testimonies that is thoughtfully curated and provides visitors with a varied selection of video clips. The oral history videos can be identified by selecting 1-Collection, 2-Gender, 3-Ghetto Name, 4-Camp Name, 5-Interviewee Name, and 6-Recording Year. This noteworthy identifying function clarifies the context and significance of each clip and helps find other clips that relate to similar themes and topics. As a non-Jewish person, I found the testimonies page provided me an opportunity to connect and better understand the experiences of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. The oral histories in Let them Speak are an invaluable resource to learn more about this important historical event.
The fragments page is a unique and innovative component of the archive's website and provides the viewer with a visual representation of the relationships between the interviewees in the archive. The page displays a tree-like structure that shows the connections between interviewees based on their geographic location, family relationships, and other factors. Let the Speak metadata and user interface make it easy for users to navigate and explore the tree, making it a useful tool for researchers, educators, and anyone interested in learning more about the Holocaust and its survivors. The fragment page offers users a distinct approach to investigate the connections between the interviewees in the archive and enhances comprehension of the testimonies' social and geographical backgrounds.Each interviewee in the tree is represented by a node that includes information such as their name, geographic location, and family relationships. Users can click on each node to access more detailed information about the interviewee, including links to their video testimonies and other materials in the archive.