Integrating a Massive Digital Video Archive into Humanities Teaching and Research

Although the use of digital video in humanities teaching
and research is growing, there are few studies that
examine how it is used and what its impact is. One of the largest
collections of digital video for use in education is the Shoah
Visual History Archive, which was established by Steven
Spielberg following the filming of Schindler's List to create a
visual record of Holocaust survivors for use in education. The
archive collects over 52,000 testimonies by survivors and
witnesses of the Holocaust in 32 languages, yielding more than
110,000 hours of video. Over 38,000 of these testimonies have
been digitized, and over 34,000 have been indexed using a set
of more than 30,000 descriptive terms.
During the 2003-2004 academic years, 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.
Although the project has ended, all three universities continue
their support of the archive. The team from Rice University (
<http://shoah.rice.edu> ) will report on applications
of the archive in humanities teaching and research between
2003 and 2005 and cover three basic topics: how the archive
was used in research projects in the humanities, how instructors
adapted the archive for specific pedagogical purposes, and how
the nature and content of the archive affected student
engagement with their course material.
Humanities research
Because it collects so much data and captures the
first-person accounts of Holocaust survivors in a dynamic
form, the Visual History Archive is a rich resource for research.
Students have used the archive for research projects in topics
ranging from rhetoric to violence and trauma. For instance, three graduate students in anthropology presented their
observations on working with the archive as part of a panel at
the American Anthropological Association conference in
December, 2004. Research studies include "On forms of the
Other and of the chronotope in memories of Rus Czerwona"
(Potoczniak), "Cultural logics of memorialization reflected in
the Survivors of the Shoah archive" (Baum), and "History and
memory: Turkish and Jewish accounts of communal life before
and after WWII on the island of Rhodes" (Erkan). In addition,
a medical ethicist is using the archive to examine the role of
doctors and nurses in resistance activities.
Despite the archive’s potential for research, the process of
identifying and viewing relevant testimonies proved difficult
for some, since the keyword structure is elaborate, the number
of testimonies potentially overwhelming, the technology
occasionally unreliable, and the length of each testimony
(anywhere from an hour to 18 hours, with 2.5 hours being the
average) daunting. Student and faculty experiences with the
archive, as well as a usability study undertaken by a graduate
student in psychology, yielded significant recommendations
for improvements to the web interface and point to ways that
video archives can be better integrated into education.
Humanities pedagogy
No new courses were created in conjunction with the
project. Rather, we set out to integrate the archive into
existing courses and thereby assess its pedagogical implications
in a broad context, investigating how humanities instructors
would use a vast archive of digital video. Courses in religious
studies, comparative literature, film studies, rhetoric, women
and gender studies, and even classics employed the archive.
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. Among the assignments given
to students were creating documentary videos based upon the
Shoah materials, making presentations comparing pre- and
post-War Jewish life as revealed in Shoah testimonies, and
writing an essay analyzing two testimonies in relation to
Samantha Power’s recent book on genocide, A Problem from
Hell.
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, finding 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. For many students, video
proved to be more compelling than written sources, since they
could see the facial expressions of the survivors and hear the
tone of their voices.
Bibliography
Baum, Eric. "Cultural logics of memorialization reflected in
the Survivors of the Shoah archive." Paper delivered at the
2004 American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings,
Atlanta, Georgia. 19 December 2004.
Potoczniak, Anthony. "On forms of the Other and of the
chronotope in memories of Rus Czerwona." Paper delivered
at the 2004 American Anthropological Association Annual
Meetings, Atlanta, Georgia. 19 December 2004.
Saka, Erkan. "History and memory: Turkish and Jewish
accounts of communal life before and after WWII on the island
of Rhodes." Paper delivered at the 2004 American
Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, Atlanta,
Georgia. 19 December 2004.
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Accessed
2005-04-06. <http://www.vhf.org/>