Review: In Search of the Drowned

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Gabor Mihaly Toth
During the Holocaust, 5.8 million Jewish people were killed.Most of the victims did not leave behind any records that could help reconstruct their experiences.While survivor history has been well studied in the last decades, how millions of voiceless victims experienced their persecutions has remained a terra incognita.
Generally, while perpetrator history is well-documented, the voiceless victims' perspectives have resisted any form of documentation.Their emotional and mental experiences conveyed through novels and memoirs have remained fragmented, and these experiences have often been dismissed as subjective and unreliable.
Today, digital history and digital humanities offer new forms of inquiry and representations.They can unlock the emotional, mental, and physical realities in which voiceless victims of the Holocaust or other genocides were forced to live.To address the experience of the voiceless, In Search of the Drowned brings together theoretical considerations underlying genocide and Holocaust studies with new practices of digital scholarship.
Most importantly, it elaborates on and features new digital representations that symbolically gives voice to the voiceless victim.The audience of the project consists of four key groups: educators, students, researchers, and general audiences interested in the Holocaust.This project consists of three core sections.The first section is a data edition of 2,700 English language testimonies (including original videos) from three major U.S. collections.The project is empowered by the corpus engine BlackLab, which makes testimony transcripts searchable as a linguistic corpus.This section also includes a tutorial on how users can take advantage of corpus linguistic approaches to study Holocaust experiences.
The second section features a digital representation aiming to give voice to the voiceless.It is an inventory presenting some aspects of the collective experience of persecutions.The inventory is the visualization of those mental, emotional, and physical experiences that any victim, including the voiceless, must have gone through.
In practice, the digital inventory presents certain episodes of persecutions that are recurrent in the 2,700 English language survivor testimonies.Elements of the inventory -named testimonial fragments -have been retrieved by means of data mining techniques and visualized with the help of a hierarchical tree.Since the experiences that the inventory features are directly connected to complete and unabridged testimony transcripts, readers can also study and read these experiences in their original contexts.
The digital inventory memorizes the voiceless by presenting the possible episodes of persecutions they must have faced.On the other hand, it opens reading paths along the mental, physical, and emotional experiences of persecutions in thousands of testimonies.The digital inventory is an innovative exploratory tool that presents various aspects of persecutions from victims' perspectives.From a scholarly point of view, the inventory draws on a key argument developed throughout a collection of essays that this project features: through the collective experience of persecutions it is possible to reconstruct a mosaic of possible physical, emotional, and mental episodes that murdered victims must have gone through.
The third section is the collection of scholarly essays that develop the theoretical and methodological underpinning of the digital representation rendering the experience of the voiceless.It focuses on three scholarly themes (experience of murdered victims, recovery of collective experience from testimonies, representation of the collective experience) in three respective parts followed by an epilogue and preceded by a prologue.In addition to the discussion of scholarly ideas, the collection of essays also involves the ideas and experiences of victims themselves.Yet, some arguments throughout the essays are developed by reflecting on leitmotifs in testimonies.The collection of scholarly essays actively uses digital storytelling to connect its arguments with victims' experience.The third section also explains the digital methodology used as part of this project and gives a detailed description of the 2,700 testimonies that the project features.
The significance of this publication is twofold.Until recently, survivors could keep up a living memory of murdered victims.Following the death of the last survivors, it is an open question of how will carry the memory of the voiceless.There are approximately 100,000 Holocaust testimonies dispersed in the archives of the world.It has often been assumed that the voiceless are implicitly present in these testimonies.In the words of Geoffrey Hartmann, a Holocaust survivor and scholar, as well as one of the founders of the Yale Fortunoff Archive, in their testimonies survivors "speak for the dead and in the name of the dead."Today, with the imminent death of last survivors, it is crucial to reflect on how the implicit presence of the dead in thousands of testimonies can be made explicit to next generations.This is an important challenge for historians, archivists, and curators.prewar biographies and local relations.Data mining and processing, as Toth does, will help shift us further away from (merely) empirical reconstructions that have dominated Holocaust studies.Simply asking these questions only shows the impact that Toth's excellent project will have on all of us in the coming decades.
The project was developed by Gabor M. Toth (project conceptualization, data processing, backend development, scholarly argumentation, content development), in collaboration with the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (frontend development, user experience and web design) and the Yale Fortunoff Archive (funding and project facilitation).