Understanding the Trauma of Genocide:

On Thursday, February 15, The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention hosted three presentations and a roundtable discussion by field experts. The Center’s Visual History Archive is in the process of transcribing all of their collection, presenting new challenges and opportunities for engaging the 54,000 testimonies contained in the collection. The panelists discussed different strategies for effectively studying the enormous amount of data collected on the oral histories of Holocaust survivors, from close reading to distant reading.

The event began with presentations from the three panelists speaking about three different approaches to studying testimonials. The panelists included:

·      Tim Cole, Professor of Social History and Director of the Brigstow Institute, University of Bristol

·      Sharon Kangisser, Director of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People and Director of the Eli and Diana Zborowski Centre for the Study of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, Yad Vashem

·      Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D. Professor of Clinical Psychology at The Fielding Graduate University

In his talk titled: “Reading One Testimony, Distant Reading 54,000,” Tim Cole discussed some of the opportunities and challenges of distant reading oral history transcripts using corpus linguistics methods. Informed by experimental work that Tim and his team conducted around this vast archive, this talk addressed both the potential and possible problems of working with digital humanities approaches.

Sharon Kangisser gave a talk titled: “Finding the Individual in Multiple Collections,” in which she noted that over the past 70 years many survivors of the Holocaust have given their testimony to various collections and institutions – beginning in the immediate post-war period and continuing until the present day. She examined the archival challenges involved in mapping out the stories of individuals over time and finding testimonies in various collections, and also discussed how a diversity of retellings expands scholars' understanding of the traumatic event and its meaning for survivors.

The third panelist, Ruthellen Josselson, in her talk, “Amalgamating Understanding in Narrative Analysis,” discussed the challenge of building a knowledge base that can amalgamate the insight and understandings across researchers. This form of qualitative meta-analysis entails the engaged complication of data as more nuanced discussion of findings ensues from the analytic process. Josselson concluded that this can serve a more thorough understanding of the experiences represented in the narratives.

The evening concluded with a roundtable discussion with the three panelists exploring how the different approaches to studying testimonials they presented can work in tandem to provide a more holistic understanding of the stories told by Holocaust survivors. Typically, in this kind of research, the ruling logic is that if multiple researchers come to the same conclusion, it must be correct; but the panelists argued that it is much more interesting to look at the differences between conclusions in an attempt to understand how those differences can enrich our understanding of survivor experiences.

During the Q&A discussion that followed, the panelists answered questions that mostly revolved around how their conclusions can help inform future research into the study of survivor testimonials. The panelists encouraged students interested in this type of research to set out with an intentional approach in the collection of testimonials of recent and current genocides in a way that will be of value to future research. Survivor stories and testimonials are important in understanding the trauma of these experiences and as educational tools that can hopefully prevent such atrocities from happening in the future.