A Digital Video Archive:
Educating Youth, Reaching the Public, and Preserving the Memory of the Holocaust
Shoah Foundation Institute University of Southern California
2008
http://college.usc.edu/vhi/
What Do We Do?
1994 – 2000
Collect video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses before it is too late
2000 – 2005
Digitize, index, and catalogue the testimonies to make them accessible to students, teachers, and scholars
2006 – present
Provide access to and use the
Institute’s testimonies for educational purposes
52,000 interviews
Visual History Archive
THE MISSION STATEMENT
To overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—
through the educational use of the
Institute’s visual history testimonies
Testimony Collection
52,000 videotaped testimonies 100,000 hours
56 countries 32 languages
by
2,000 interviewers 1,000 videographers
70 regional staff
1994 – 2000
Interviews by Experience
Jewish Survivors ca. 49,000
Rescuers and Aid Providers ca. 1,100
Sinti and Roma (Gypsy) Survivors ca. 400 Liberators and Liberation Witnesses ca. 360
Political Prisoners ca. 260
Jehovah’s Witness Survivors ca. 80
War Crimes Trials Participants ca. 70 Survivors of Eugenics Policies 13
Homosexual Survivors 8
Response and Legacy
• Original vision nearly 15 years ago “So generations never forget what so few lived to tell” and “To capture on videotape the faces and voices of survivors and other witnesses before it was too late
• Full life story
• Not the first, nor was it the “only” effort
• Survivors around the world, regardless of language and culture, understood the purpose
• Concern about the “sweep” of such a large project
• The very existence of a testimony project with such breadth could signify a replacement
• Nothing can replace the ineffable experience of relating to and
connecting with a human being
Opportunities
Survivors in the Classroom and Survivor Video Testimony both have the potential to:
• Exemplify the human story
• Tell what happened to individuals, families, communities
• Help localize history
• Provide information that is often not found in other sources
• Can be an effective way to help students see others like themselves
• Enable students to connect with history
• Raise issues that adolescents confront in their daily lives: fairness, justice, individual responsibility, etc.
• Inspire students’ dialogue about their own role in the society
Visits of Survivors to a Classroom and Survivor Video Testimony
With mediation and context, video testimony can enhance not only the study of history, but also literature, language arts, civics, religion, character education, diversity awareness,
etc.
Whereas it is impossible to replace a human being by a video tape, the video testimony can also serve as an educational resource for educators and students
Visit of a Survivor to the Classroom
• Original source
• Opportunity of interaction and connection between the students and the survivor
• Capacity for inspiration
• Impromptu and spontaneous nature
• Potential for ongoing connection
Video Testimony
• Flexibility (testimony can be edited for specific purposes, whereas survivor's visit cannot)
• Modular application (clips from several testimonies can be used within one topic)
• Transportability (can be brought in
classrooms all over the world, web capacity)
• Applicability (clips can be used in products:
textbooks, films, multimedia, etc.)
• Teacher has an opportunity to provide additional historical context
• Can be preserved and used in perpetuity
Communication Medium
Stanisław Jonas
Interview Transcript (fragment)
Stanisław Jonas:
Sometimes, in totally unexpected situations,
now that I am in America for instance, when someone asks me if I am Jewish I am quite capable of saying, “No.”
• Speech
• Voice quality (volume, pitch, rhythm, accent)
• Facial expression
• Eye contact
• Emotion
• Intonation
• Clothing
• Background, etc.
Written Text Video Testimony
Global Initiatives
Interest in use of testimony in education:
• Out of 2,238 educators surveyed in Poland, 90% indicated strong interest in using video testimony in a new educational product (2007 national survey – feasibility study for development of new educational product with Polish history teachers and education specialists)
• Out of 2,783 evaluations collected between August 2006 and March 2008, 98% of Echoes and Reflections teachers rated the video clips “excellent” or “very good.” (Evaluation of Echoes and Reflections, Goodman Research Group; Jan 2007)
• In a survey with 336 educators in Ukraine, when choosing from a variety of curricular components of the Encountering Memory teacher’s guide (historical references, maps, biographies, etc.), teachers rated video testimonies as the most effective element of their lessons. (Piloting of Encountering Memory; 2007)
Creating and distributing educational programs
• Develop a new generation of web-based educational tools to support educators and inspire students
• Institute partners create content and foreign-language
content can be found on www.college.usc.edu/vhi
Students respond to the video testimonies
• 88% of a sample of 155 Echoes and Reflections students polled reported an above-average to excellent impression of the video testimonies. (Evaluation of Echoes and Reflections, Goodman Research Group; Jan 2007)
• In the same survey, students rated the video testimonies and visual media highest as compared to other
curriculum components: over 80% scored these components with either a 4 or a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 as the highest rating).(Evaluation of Echoes and Reflections, Goodman Research Group; Jan 2007)
• In another survey conducted with students, 41 out of 42 students indicated an interest in learning more by
Global Initiatives
Students are seeking out and consuming visual media
• 57% of online teens* say that they watch videos on video sharing sites such as YouTube. (Pew Internet & American Life/Teens and Social Media;
Dec 2007. National study. *n=935 parent-child pairs who have access to Internet in their house.
• 3 in 4 young adult Internet users* watch or download video online. On a typical day, nearly 1 in 3 consumes an online video. (Pew Internet &
American Life/Teens and Social Media; Dec 2007. National study. *n=935 parent-child pairs)
Global Initiatives
Increasing access to the archive
http://college.usc.edu/vhi/testimoniesaroundtheworld/
• 20 institutions in the US and abroad have access to the entire archive via Internet2
• 100 sites in 23 countries have testimony collections
Driving academic scholarship
• More than 100 courses are being taught at I2 sites.
Preservation of the testimonies
http://college.usc.edu/vhi/preservation/
• Videotape deteriorates
• State-of-the-art technology to duplicate testimonies in a digital format
• Institute will create other copies that can be played on any commercial video player
