Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory: Advancing the Field of Testimony Studies

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

After a decade of collaborative, computational experimentation, Todd Presner (with contributions by Anna Bonazzi, Rachel Deblinger, Lizhou Fan, Michelle Lee, Kyle Rosen, and Campbell Yamane) published a “digitally extended” book called Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory (Princeton University Press, 2024). Supplemented by dozens of interactive data visualizations and an extensive data repository, the book details a range of Digital Humanities methods that explore how computation can humanize and deepen our understanding of testimony. This roundtable will bring together Presner with two of his longtime collaborators and contributors to the book: Rachel Deblinger and Anna Bonazzi. Together, they will discuss the years of collaborative work that led to this publication, the various Digital Humanities methods employed in the book, the choice to publish a print book to reflect years of computational research, and some of the challenges of scholarly work in this dynamic field.

Ethics of the Algorithm explores how testimonies can be textually mined to fill in “gaps” and “missing voices” through corpus linguistic analysis, including code switching, speech patterns, changes in voice, tempo, and expressivity. While much of the analysis moves between “close” and “distant” listening, ethical questions are always at the forefront of our approach and permeate the ways we think about digital methods, digital archives, and computational approaches in humanizing the experiences of survivors and the voices of the victims.

In particular, we will explore three central questions: (1) How has computational analysis opened up new questions and lines of inquiry into Holocaust Studies; (2) How can Holocaust testimony serve as a model for using Digital Humanities methods for other kinds of difficult histories and memory driven fields?; and (3) Why choose a print book to share and preserve digital work? In other words, we are interested in interrogating how this work speaks both to the field of Holocaust Studies and Digital Humanities and the need to preserve our efforts in print to spark discourse across these fields.

Sub Unit

• Digital Humanities (Wildcard Division)

Moderator

• Robert Ehrenreich, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Discussants

• Todd Presner, University of California, Los Angeles

• Rachel Deblinger, UCLA

• Anna Bonazzi

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 03