Hannah Arendt poignantly wrote that understanding how antisemitism led to the rather unimpeded Holocaust, cannot “be fully explained and grasped” nonetheless, she and numerous historians have tried, including David Nirenberg who states that we must trace [the] origins and track how certain members of society were excluded, expelled and/or executed based on their religion and/or race. Through my ‘close reading’ of the history of the evolution of antisemitism, and its role in this part of the historiography of the Holocaust, in conjunction (or in collaboration) with the ‘distant reading’ of several innovative digital humanities (‘DH’) projects, I will demonstrate how DH scholars (‘digital humanists’) help historians investigate vast troves of digitized materials, to confirm, clarify, contradict, uncover new and/or under-researched historical information that was previously beyond reach for an individual’s close reading, for a more accurate and/or comprehensive historiography. In this paper, I will “oscillate between close and distant reading,” with its digital text and discourse analysis, in researching antisemitism in the late 19th century and early 20th century, where historians state that it has evolved from anti-Judaism to modern antisemitism or from a theological anti-Judaism to a modern, racial antisemitism.

The textual analysis available through Digital Humanities tools may have been criticized in the past, but this should no longer be an issue given that for history and historians in particular, “traces of the past are also embedded in the visual— photographs, paintings, sketches—and material culture [and thus, t]he proliferation of digitized visual sources[,] presents historians with exciting new technical and theoretical problems and opportunities,” which we’ll see later in this paper. Initially, digital innovations in the field of history were regarded with some skepticism and a debate existed among historians whether “Digital History” was just a research tool or whether it should be considered a separate academic field. Digital Humanities is that field, and there are scholars considered experts in both history and Digital Humanities. I’d like to say that my role in authoring this paper is one of a “project manager” of sorts.

Historians mustn’t worry that their intellectual studies will be replaced with big data or that digital methodologies will replace intelligent inquiry. Digital methodologies are neither alternatives to historical theories nor are they significant outside of the historical framework. Many scholars still use their expertise to explore and extract information manually, thus focusing on what they consider important. Nonetheless, digital humanities tools and methodologies, such as the ones that I will be highlighting in this paper, are accessible and demonstrate how the work of historians can be enhanced and can also present nuances, patterns and/or under researched datapoints that may be overlooked or not available with close reading. Digital humanities can support historians to research digital archives and repositories and digital humanists are able to extrapolate patterns in big data, which isn’t possible by browsing or by using a sampling method. Big data sets may have not been accessible in the past, but as the result of the digitization of countless archives of World War II history, and the historiography of the Holocaust in particular, over the last twenty years or so, and through the efforts of digital humanists (aka digital humanities researchers or scholars), “corpora available for historical research that are simply too large to be examined in their entirety and to be perused manually,” are now accessible. Doubts of historians being replaced by digital humanities, have by now most likely been put aside.

There’s enough work to go around for both the historians and digital humanists, which is what we’re about to learn from the digital humanities authors of “Representation of Jews and Anti-Jewish Bias in 19th Century French Public Discourse: Distant and Close Reading,” Writing the digital history of Nazi Germany, and “Big Data for Global History: The Transformative Promise of Digital Humanities.” These authors employ digital solutions to present and disseminate historiographical sources, based on historians’ scholarship on antisemitism, Nazi Germany, and racial theory, respectively. The examples I cite in this paper attest to the benefits of using digital methods when dealing with digital sources and archives, and thus with big data sets.¹⁰ Technological tools, including commercial platform solutions can be deployed to disseminate historical metadata, which can help expand our knowledge about this history. Digital methods of mapping, text analysis and visualization can provide what close reading and browsing, which until recently was common practice, can’t achieve.⁹ For instance, the list of digitized collections of Holocaust studies in the Library of Congress alone are immense and it would take several lifetimes for any historian to examine the contents in the digitized. Indeed, some historians have recognized since at least the 1970s that there are digitized archives available for historical research that are simply too large to be examined in their entirety and to be perused manually.

Historians are “anchored in the premise that language and language use are [fundamental] for historical, political, and social realities.” As such, historical semantics, the linguistic production of meaning, is essential for studying the evolution of antisemitism. The DH studies under review, illustrate how the history of discourse can benefit from digital humanities methodologies; namely, digitized archive materials created with machine learning through “the lens of distant reading.” The datasets of these studies, were transcribed using Computer Vision (CV) technology, which use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to “access, process, analyze, and understand visual information.” For decades now, the digitization of printed materials via optical character recognition (OCR) have allowed a reader to browse and/or read books deeply (close reading), but OCR has also enabled distant reading, the term coined by Franco Moretti. Franco Moretti wrote in “Distant Reading” that since humans have limitations in their ability to close read (Moretti 2000), distant reading can alleviate a close reader’s limitations. For example, in “From Distant to Public Reading,” it was calculated, that if person were to only read all the English novels published in 2000, at a pace of 200 words per minute, it would take approximately 80 years – without any interruptions, including sleeping and eating! Conventional sampling methods of text or “pre-defined corpora,” to some extent, address the challenge of big data in that they reduce the amount of data to manageable proportions or to what is deemed relevant. Digital humanists or historians, in scrutinizing, selecting and thus determining what is significant, during the close reading process or digital humanities methodologies (i.e., translation tool and tag clouds generated by Voyant), can then tailor a DH linguistic analysis, which can then add “the reader’s interpretive sensitivity to the picture.” The digital humanists work cited in paper, reflect several ways of examining digitized archival material, which in the context of this research has provided a broader understanding of this part of the historiography of the Holocaust.

In this paper, the text analysis of three separate corpora covering specific time periods were created and used to examine text extracts of the French, German and Dutch languages from published books, periodicals, and/or newspapers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In each scenario, an analysis on the topics, related to antisemitism and its central theme in Holocaust studies, are compared to the close reading I provide for the historical perspective, where I set the scene like a dramaturg does in a Playbill – giving the audience an idea of the political and cultural environment in the timeframe of when the play or opera was written (I’m thinking of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Nabucco as I write this, which I believe fits the antisemitic narrative). Each dataset selected by these DH researchers is considered large and although size is not the only problem having been considered by these researchers, it can be an obstacle. Another concern is the “conceptual problem [of] reading (or, unreading) …through the lenses of others, has the potential to miss direct contact with the text itself.” In other words, the close reader is not completely removed from the machine-learning algorithms, or “the human is not removed from humanities.’

I decided to do a text analysis for a company stock research report that was published by a work colleague. What I hope to accomplish is to see whether someone looking at the Voyant maps below, can guess the author’s gender, from the themes, and use of language in the report. Also, I thought it would be interesting to see if the Voyant maps would be enough for a reader to determine the name and ticker of the stock in question, relying solely on the data presented. Furthermore, without knowing the industry (sector), or the stock ticker, with this data, could one be able to determine the analyst’s recommendation (Buy, Hold or Sell). I tried to select a stock that isn’t widely traded such as AAPL or META.

After Glancing over the words and seeing “resorts”, “gaming”, “casino”, and the abbreviation “lv”, I would imagine that a non-financial reader would decipher that the document in question is gambling related.

For someone with a financial background, common debt related acronyms, namely, “ebitda“, short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and “ebitdar“, short for EBITDA + restructuring or rent costs, would also lead one to know that the stock was Casino related. With regards to a rating, the words “growth” and “revenue” are rather large in comparison to other words, and as such, I’d think that the reader could guess that the analyst has a favorable view on the stock. A few other words that are sizable, would probably not trigger clues for someone not familiar with this company’s name or the stock symbol, but the clues such as “locals”, “rock”, & “red” would be enough for one to take an educated guess, in my view. Two other words of note are “population” and “land” – Vegas has been growing for the last decade…

The frequency of some words used, would also help one guess the stock in question.

Here the word “durango ” stands out, which isn’t a great clue given the city is in Colorado, and we’ve already determined that the company in question is in Las Vegas. If one does a Google search for “Durango Las Vegas” however, one can get even closer to guessing the stock in question.

During this exercise in “distant reading,” and after reading Distant Reading after Moretti and Gender and Cultural Analytics: Finding or Making Stereotypes?, I tried to see if the gender of the author could be established from the vocabulary, which I would imagine is difficult when reviewing technical or analytical work. In scrutinizing all the words, I did come across the word “gun” and wondered if it was used to make a great effort to win or obtain something – a term that I’ve infrequently used by some male friends, but that I haven’t recalled hearing from female friends or family.

This caused me to wonder about the context in which it was used, but that didn’t prove anything as noted below, but this did lead me to wonder whether there are ways to be mindful of how “a conclusion about ‘male’ and ‘female’ modes of thinking and writing as if the M/F terms were simple pointers to an unproblematic reality” (Gender and Cultural Analytics: Finding or Making Stereotypes?). This isn’t as much of a concern or problem in finance, where being a good stock picker has nothing to do with gender, in my view.

Can you guess the stock?

In response to the Open Access (OA) as Solving Problems chapter in Peter Subers book, it is interesting to note that although Ivy League libraries may not support current models for publishing scholarly information (including OA), they nonetheless continue to perpetuate them and lack creative ideas to improve them. Here’s something interesting that one of my professor’s (Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Scholarly Communication) raised with regards to going beyond Open Access with Public Access. The statement from the IvyPlus libraries can be found here. Prof. Cirasella states that the IvyPlus response is a reaction to a federal memo about increasing public access to federally funded research. But she is critical of the fact that that there’s no plan in the memo for how public access will be achieved.

I just got to checkoff one of my academic “bucket list” accomplishments of editing a Wikipedia article, but I’m not sure that it was as satisfying an experience as I had expected. I actually went about this exercise in reverse order; namely, I dove into the fairly intuitive editing process of an article, prior to reading thru all the policies, guidelines, pillars and taking the quizzes that are part of the daunting tutorial process and before reading our class assignments for October 3, 2023. Luckily, my assigned topic involved editing a post on Rise Asset Development, a public-private initiative that provides financial support to individuals seeking self-employment despite being challenged with mental health and addictions issues – all personal interests of mine. In fear of reprisal or rejection, I took extra care in providing a thorough copyedit and checked sources (when available) to avoid tainting my work (or reputation) with any non – “neutral” text or subtle biases. This portion of the assignment was a little nerve wracking, and it took me a lot longer than I had anticipated but was rewarding overall. 

It wasn’t until I completed the Wiki.edu module that I realized how onerous it is for broad public participation. Said another way, that the barriers to entry may cause limited contribution and thus promote exclusivity, in my view. Nonetheless, the platform is a great educational resource, and I am grateful to have benefited enormously from its content for close to two decades. It’s understandable that strict guidelines for entitling access to edit or add topics to Wikipedia are necessary for content integrity. However, the rigidity of the platform and the power of content administrators, have made me cognizant of the fact that this is a platform where creativity and controversy are prohibited. On the flip side, this stifling ecosystem is reassuring in that the content aims to be non- biased or “unaligned” (see below).

This brings me to the “Beyond the Hashtags” article on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, where I decided to check Wikipedia to see if this incredibly insightful study of archived Tweets of this “public-facing digital platform¹” was sourced. Here, I was dismayed to see a one-sentence factual attribution to a 92-page document, which I targeted to connect to the Wikipedia learning experience.  Here’s the one liner:

Although not altogether comparable platforms, the twitter participant experience in “Beyond the Hashtags,” vastly contrasts that of Wikipedia. This realization isn’t necessary new for me, but after this assignment, I am acutely aware of the sterility of Wikipedia – especially in the topic of Black Lives Matter. Wikipedia lacks the inclusive historiography of Black Lives Matter, as I discovered from reading Possibly Impossible, where “Wikipedia itself admits that the “notability” requirement is one that reinforces the online resource’s systemic bias.” I don’t deny that Wikipedia is exceptionally informative and educational, but it isn’t a democratic platform.  Not to say that the elimination of sardonic text isn’t sometimes appreciated. For instance, in “Beyond the Hashtags,” there are two very snarky biased twitter references that help prevent compromise or mutual agreement between liberals and conservatives.

The first instance, is on page 29 where the “unaligned parties”/mainstream media are maligned for not advocating for or against the movement and police violence victims.” Here the authors find fault with “’neutral’” news media for “aiding the other side by emphasizing or minimizing particular facts or interpretations thereof.” Huh? Isn’t it the role of mainstream media to deliver the news objectively?

The second is where both the left and the right arrive at the same conclusion, but along different lines of thought or ideologies, whereby “conservatives were not above incorporating partisan jabs into their condemnations of Eric Garner’s death.”  Here, the right can’t leave well enough alone – they can’t be seen as coming to the same conclusion of “anti-brutality activists” and so they “attempt to claim Garner as a tax martyr because the law he violated was a state tax law,” and we know the right hates taxes PP. 61-62).  At least this mutual agreement on police brutality by both sides was picked up by Twitter – there’s no reference to this on Wikipedia.

¹“Possibly Impossible; Or, Teaching Undergraduates to Confront Digital and Archival Research Methodologies, Social Media Networking, and Potential Failure” on Manifold @CUNY (manifoldapp.org)

I’ve become increasingly aware of citations as a research tool to dig deeper into a topic and the importance of attributing credit to scholars for their work. Of particular interest to me, are the links and citations in Lev Manovich’s “What is Visualization?” and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “More Scale, More Questions: Observations from Sociology.” In both articles, we are exposed to visualization methods in “cultural texts, […] poems, paintings, music compositions, architecture, or, more recently, computer games, generative artworks, and interactive environments.”

In Manovich’s piece for example, the advent of information visualization, has allowed us to observe historical events that are expressed artistically, to exhibit “many moments spread across time and bringing all of them together in one single moment to create something new.” A timeline of events in history are cleverly displayed to remind us of our country’s economic struggles and advances, its cultural trends, its tragedies, and successes. The progression of these images in this timeline of magazine covers also reflect advances in technological developments, such as with the use of drawings, paintings, photography, “contemporary software-based visual(s),” via color, clarity, and hue; namely from applications that were once only available in black and white.  

Although “synecdoche” is referred to in Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux example, I feel that in the Manovich Mapping Time exhibit, also remind us that many Time Magazine covers are meant to associate something larger than just what we see in an image. In my view, these associations are often taken for granted, including the time it may have taken for both the original work to arrive at its final “edition” and the effort of the digital humanist(s) in reimagining this work. This exercise has caused me to be more “mindful” of the creators’ goal(s) of achieving reactions of awe from those of us (or at a minimum me) that study or observe their work.

This brings me back to the relevance of citations of the written word, but with a somewhat different significance.  Here I’m more interested in McMillan Cottom’s argument on how:

“Sociology has developed a diverse toolkit to identify, measure, and analyze various forms of text with an attention to political economy. This includes content analysis (e.g., newspaper content), organizational analysis (e.g., texts produced by institutions or organizations), and quantitative narrative analysis or QNA (e.g., a sociological complement to distant reading).”  

She cites: Franzosi, Roberto, Gianluca De Fazio, and Stefania Vicari. “Ways of Measuring Agency: An Application of Quantitative Narrative Analysis to Lynchings in Georgia (1875–1930).” Sociological Methodology 42, no. 1 (2012): 1–42.  Where the structure of sentences and the use of grammar has provided an understanding of literature by aggregating and analyzing data. Rather than reading things “up close,” the authors of this article insist that by reading a book (i.e., a Victorian novel), one “can’t uncover the true scope and nature of literature…because the sample size is too small.” Furthermore, the grammar of a particular era, as written in literature, newspapers, police logs, etc., have properties or nuances that the reader can’t detect without the aid of computers and coding, which “provide graphical representations of the relationships between social actors taking advantage of… the subject-verb-object (“SVO”)” and their modifiers, to produce a powerful “story grammar.” Here’s an example of the sourcing of “massive amounts of data” to produce one of the maps of the lynching atrocities in Georgia between 1875 and 1930:

When I first learned about Bitcoin about seven years ago, I fantasized about quitting my job, going coding school and embarking on a world changing future Blockchain project for a well-funded tech start-up that not only had stock options but paid salaries with crypto.  Before taking the giant leap of quitting my job, I went to an introductory meeting for a coding boot camp, of which there were many at that time, for an idea of what was in store for me.  This first step was a big letdown, because I left the session feeling that I didn’t have a good knowledge base, the academic prerequisites or skills required to take the class.  In order to go to bootcamp, I would need to take Python and learn other coding skills prior to being admitted, which I wasn’t willing to do at the time. Needless to say, I never quit my job or pursued Bitcoin mining, but this didn’t stop me from doing a little investing….

Fast forward to this intro to DH class where we are exposed to digital methodologies and are required to “learn some of the fundamental skills used often in digital humanities projects,” including skill workshops, as the one I recently attended called: Introduction to Python with Rebecca Krisel. The class was much less intimidating than expect and the instructor was very deliberate in emphasizing that like with any foreign language, one needs to practice, make mistakes and with time and effort, muscle memory will kicks in.

I’ve installed Python on my PC. I’ll start by learning terms and replicating some of what Rebecca went over in the class. I’ve also downloaded a children’s book from the Mina Rees Library for reference. I look forward to the follow-up Python class(es0, but I have started playing around with some easy exercises and here’s what I’ve come up with thus far for days 1 and 2 of practice:

I was a geography major in college and “I’m old enough to” have studied cartography before “personal computers and electronic publishing,” to quote Mark Monmonier. As I recall, the analog map that I created ‘back in the day,’ was called The Houses of Worship in Delaware County, Ohio, where I attended college, and it was created using tools that included a compass, cartography paper, planimeters, stencils, pencils, erasers and dividers.

Despite my college major, I am neither a cartographer nor a geographer, but this latest assignment has caused me to examine how I use maps or non-traditional maps on a day-to-day basis outside of travel. I came up with one prime example and that’s in my current career in finance: namely, in the transportation sector of fundamental equity research and specifically in the subsectors of trucking and logistics.

Since Covid, the trucking and logistics parts of the economy have been of great concern for research analysts as well as everyday retail consumers. According to Ernst & Young, the “COVID-19 pandemic accelerated preexisting issues in the supply chain and brought priorities such as visibility, resilience and digitization to the fore.” What we closely observe in fundamental research are data points that affect the forward earnings of stocks that we follow and those for which we publish equity (stock) research. Some of the data inputs that were of particular concern during COVID were bottlenecks in ocean freight scheduling, port congestion, worker shortages, pricing constraints and warehousing capacity. Since earlier this year, as the logistics of moving products has eased, the shift in interest has been around inventory stocking and the health of the consumer. These and other current economic issues can at times be mapped, but given the many variables needed, we often source data from third-party vendors to arrive at month-over-month trends, which we can then use to provide our investors with projections (albeit some may be “distorted”) on where we value stocks. In this current economic cycle, trucking (including truck brokers) is facing a difficult path into 2024. Many trucking companies are cutting costs in a high diesel fuel cost environment (a large contributor to shrinking margins) as they are experiencing lower demand from retailers, their main clients, because they already may be stuck with seasonal inventory that is taking up warehouse space. Furthermore, the UAW (and previous labor negotiations) have been and are additional risks to the future earnings for labor and products dependent sectors…in this instance autos and drivers, respectively. The pandemic inventory stocking went from a “just-in-case” over stocking environment to a “just-in-time” for seasonal products state – one that was customary pre-pandemic. How would one map these data points and concerns?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, my firm uses third party vendors for certain data and in my attempt to recreate a map, I’ve chosen one particular data point and that’s tender volume. The map below reflects tender volume, which is a load offer from a shipper to a trucking company. The national trucking companies can use this heat map to determine where they may find the highest volumes to keep their truckers busy and those areas where less staff is needed. The higher volume areas also allow the trucking companies to charge more for deliveries. It is noteworthy that most of the map indicates steady or declines in tender volumes – perhaps a good indication of a slowing economy – something that economists watch, but also a consideration for fundamental research analysts.

I tried to replicate this map with my free version of Tableau, but I’m still not skilled in re-creating the data inputs.

Maria Popova’s “Digital Humanities Spotlight” calls attention to technological accomplishments achieved in the last century. She also aptly states that there’s “a large portion of humanity’s richest cultural heritage that remains buried in analog archives” and it is in the “fledgling discipline” of Digital Humanities (DH) where this information is repositioned/repurposed online via “technologies like infrared scans, geolocation mapping, and optical character recognition.” Popova also states that because of DH, some of the cultural heritage once confined to the “privileged elite” has been “democratize(d).”

I’m familiar with Popova and recall listening to a podcast that Tim Ferriss had with her a while back. I got distracted by all of the enticing posts in the “favorite reads” section that are featured on the website and thus, I meandered away from the “Digital Humanities Spotlight (Spotlights)” and clicked on the post Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss. I was struck to see the words “Hannah Arendt” and “Love” appear together. Could this really be the German-born American historian and political philosopher or to quote Popova, “one of the most piercing intellects of the twentieth century”? Was this the same person that had produced volumes of serious scholarly work – a fraction of which I’ve read and studied including sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism? Is this the same revered academic that is quoted by many other scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, Giorgio Agamben, and Zygmunt Bauman? Yes, indeed!  

The post didn’t disappoint – I learned the cringe worthy fact that Arendt had an affair with her 36-year-old (Nazi leaning) professor, Martin Heidegger, when she was a 19-year-old university student! Some of their love letters are in the book Love and Saint Augustine, where Arendt, in true DH fashion, kept the past alive by:

“…simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts [used] in her political works of the same period. The dissertation became a bridge over which [she] traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg [where she received a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1928] and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine’s question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change” (Amazon).

In reading this post, I started to think that perhaps The Marginalian website, is a digitization project that could be considered DH. The webpage design is not only inviting but addictive and it provides a number of links that captured my interest.  It makes for a satisfying engagement experience, one where  “too much information” allowed me to feel like “a fly on the wall,” because I got to know some juicy personal things about a scholar that I admire and wish to learn more about…but is the site DH? Is it archival or, to quote Prof. Karlin, is it just “a collection”?  Well, according to her website, which Popova started in 2006 and where up until 2021,she had published more than six million pages – or as she states: “if one were to paginate and print everything.” Popova’s former site, Brain Pickings (an earlier version of the Marginalian is described here: Brain Picking – YouTube. According to Wikipedia, Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-based … writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal both for her writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it.” As such, my take is that her subject matter is selected to match and/or work with her platform and the tools she uses to curate her writings.

Popova’s site contains not only chockful links to the Arendt/Heidegger love letters, but those of others that weren’t “immune to youth’s impulse to relinquish reason for its counterpoint.” I would imagine that Popova purposely chose this DH(ish) median where the reader has the ability to actually engage “with the possible…with that which might or could be,” as Todd Presner states in “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities” (60). I certainly spent a considerable amount of time on the site – never to think of Arendt in the same way, but in one that did “enrich” my understanding of this complex and brilliant woman. In order to learn more about contemporary political theory, with an emphasis on Hannah Arendt and issues related to  democracy, I would say that Popova’s website isn’t enough for this field(s) of study or for future scholars. Hannah Arendt’s life’s work is extensive and as a result of finding the above referenced post, I searched to see if there are any other DH or interactive websites that feature her work that can really be considered “legit” DH and lo and behold I found the  Library of Congress – Hannah Arendt Digital Collections of Papers with a brief description below:

“The papers of author, educator, political philosopher, and public intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) constitute a large and diverse collection (25,000 items; 82,597 images) reflecting a complex career. The collection spans the years 1898 to 1977, with the bulk of the material beginning in 1948, three years before Arendt’s naturalization as an American citizen. The papers contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of Adolf Eichmann’s trial proceedings, notes, printed matter pertaining to Arendt’s writings, family and personal materials, evidence of Arendt’s network of fellow intellectuals, editors, writers, and theorists, and documentation of her academic affiliations and courses taught.“

Here I’d wager that this Digital Collection of Papers is considered archival and DH!

In reviewing a subset of the Reviews in the Digital Humanities repository (Volume 4, Number 6: June 2023; Review: In Search of the Drowned), I would define DH as a tool that can enhance the historiography of Holocaust studies and of Genocide and Mass Violence scholarship, while providing “a voice to the voiceless.” As noted in this Yale, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the historian Saul Friedlander in the 1990s -2000s went against the generally held position of dismissing survivor testimonies in favor of Nazi documents because they were known to have factual inaccuracies. Nonetheless, as Friedlander and DH scholars have uncovered, we now have platforms, such as the one mentioned here, that offer insights into understanding the evolution of Nazi policies toward Jews, perpetrator motivations and German citizens reactions to state promoted antisemitism propaganda. In this archive, DH allows readers and platform users to navigate the site in an attempt to understand the experience of mass violence through the victims’ eyes. In this “era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka), testimonies provide us with a view into the past, which have the potential to uncover new information and contribute to our understanding of the experience of mass violence.

A great example of this is that of Ester Fox’s testimony, which provided insight that hasn’t been well-documented. In this and other testimonies, to use Miranda Fricker’s term: “epistemic injustice (a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word)” is avoided and because the platform enhances the victim’s testimony by linking scholarly historiographical references and disclosures (throughout the passage); namely, where addition work can be explored or where more work is needed, and thus the reader can choose to further explore or stop their review.

I believe that this survival story is also of significance in that here we have a unique testimony – an example of a Jewish female doctor, who served as a concentration camp doctor in 2 camps (Guben and Bergen-Belsen) – a testimony that may never have been documented had this DH median not come to fruition. Her story is also extraordinary in that upon liberation, Ester served as a doctor in a displaced persons (DPs) hospital, where “one aspect of this post war healthcare landscape…[has] not yet [been] explored.” In my view, this survival story is also of significance in that Ester provides testimony “that fits the tasks of intersectional feminism…of communal care” in an era (1940s) when “structural misogyny and racism” were met with mass violence and genocide. Her account cannot be taken as a “trivialization of feminist methodologies” as the authors Jacqueline Wernimont & Elizabeth Losh warn us of in Bodies of Information – where modern tech culture can reinforce pre-existing biases.