Survivors of the Shoah: Bringing a Digital Video Archive to the Humanities Classroom

Diane Butler, Andrea Martin, Chris Pound

After filming Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg established the Visual History Foundation to create a visual record of testimony from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust for use in education. The foundation videotaped almost 52,000 unstructured interviews in 32 languages, yielding more than 110,000 hours of video. Today, the foundation focuses on digitizing and indexing the video to eventually make it all available online.

During the 2003-2004 academic year, Rice University, Yale University, and the University of Southern California jointly participated in a project funded by the Mellon Foundation to explore possible uses of the archive in research and teaching. The team from Rice University will report on applications of the archive in teaching the humanities and cover three basic topics: how the archive technology enabled and determined aspects of the project, how a specific rhetoric of inquiry guided each instructor to a different pedagogical potential of the archive, and how the nature and content of the archive affected student engagement with their course material.

Technological and institutional issues

The Shoah archive currently stores over 180 terabytes of video online, but the video does not stream on demand. Faculty and student researchers search the archive’s keyword index, selecting interviews that may be of interest, and their video requests are queued at the Visual History Foundation. Institutions with access to the archive have each constructed caches of 700 gigabytes or more to accept and store video requested locally. The Visual History Foundation downloads requested video to the local cache and notifies the researcher by email that the video is available. The researcher then re-enters the archive interface and watches the video, which remains in the cache temporarily for all local users to view.

The design and management of a video cache constitutes an institutional challenge to the adoption of the Shoah archive as a scholarly resource, but the necessity in this case for distributing the load on the archive to the institutions using it illustrates a general problem in sharing massive digital assets. The nature of the index and its search interface present additional challenges for user support.

Humanities pedagogy

No new courses were created in conjunction with our project. Rather, we set out to integrate the archive into existing courses and thereby assess its pedagogical implications in a broad context, drawing out widely varying interests and concerns that could be brought to bear on the archive. We assumed that many disciplines might use the archive in some capacity and offered it to everyone. Among archive users in the humanities, we had faculty teaching courses in religious studies, comparative literature, rhetoric, women and gender studies, and even classics.

All participating faculty were interviewed to elicit their pedagogical vision. Most perceived that the archive offered an opportunity for students to work with primary sources and develop multimedia projects. But in each case, the instructors imagined specific reasons and practices for engaging with the archive. Our report includes several vignettes demonstrating divergent rationalities in humanities pedagogy, giving multiple meanings to a common digital resource.

Emotions and intellectual engagement

The faces and voices in the Shoah archive are captivating. The survivors speak for as long as they want on any experience they care to recount, and every aspect of their testimony is preserved. The stories are emotionally charged, and the possibility that any detail of the testimony could acquire a sudden significance leads most viewers to attend to the matter carefully.

Our project team developed a survey to assess the emotional impact of the testimony on students, expecting to find that students who responded emotionally to the video also reported a higher level of intellectual engagement with the course material. An important secondary finding in our assessment of student engagement was that students also responded well to unexpected particularities, atypical experiences, and pre-/post-Holocaust contexts represented in the archive, justifying the archive’s attempt at comprehensiveness and its storage in a digital format to enable essentially random access.