Renana Keydar PI (LAW), Amit PinchevskiPI, Maxim IferganST, Omri Abend, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (forthcoming 2024)
Description:
Over the past decades, enormous efforts have been devoted to collecting testimonies of the last
remaining Holocaust survivors. The challenge facing us today is how to listen to those thousands
of human stories, which despite being safeguarded in archives might still one day disappear into
oblivion. The challenge is both ethical and technological: how to listen to the multiple
testimonies as an integrated body of voices and stories rather than as a collection of
fragmentary data. Unlike existing computational text mining and processing methods, which
tend to break down and reduce text to its most basic components (words mostly) – an approach
unsuitable for analyzing testimonies for moral reasons – we seek to develop a different
approach, one that will establish a new mode of “listening”: listening to the entirety of the
testimonies as a whole, and as such possible only by using advanced computing methods.
Publications:
-
Renana Keydar, Amit Pinchevski, Maxim Ifergan, Omri Abend, “The Testimony of the
Multitude: Towards a computational model of listening to Holocaust testimony”- Holocaust
and Genocide Studies Journal, UNDER REVIEW -
Renana Keydar, Amit Pinchevski, Maxim Ifergan, Omri Abend, “Testimony from the Machine:
Towards a Computational Model of Listening to Holocaust Testimonies as a Whole”- Journal
of Law, Society and Culture, UNDER REVIEW