On Our Radar: New Dimensions in Testimony
an interactive experience by the USC Shoah Foundation
The project
For years, the USC Shoah Foundation team has been recording on video the testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. They’ve collected over 54,000 of them and made them available online. However, recognizing the value of in-person exchanges and that the number of those who can still share their experiences in public is dwindling, they’ve tackled the challenge of replicating that affective real-life encounter in digital form. Using a custom-made light stage outfitted with over 50 video cameras, they’ve recorded the likes of survivor Pinchas Gutter answering over 1,500 questions about his life. Thanks to the wealth of data captured, Pinchas Gutter can appear as a hologram in any room, fidgeting on his chair and awaiting for a member of the audience to engage in a conversation with him. Thanks to Natural Language Processing, the audience’s inquiries are matched with the most appropriate responses. You can ask the avatar of the Lodz native now living in Canada, what love means to him, what he says to Holocaust deniers or what happened to him, and be met with the most honest and relevant answer.
Takeaways
- Presence: non-verbal cues, such as seeing the survivor shuffle in his seat in between questions, go a long way to create a sense of him being present in the room, this in turns generate respect from the audience. And so, the line of questioning remains polite. In one instance, they explained, students self-censored, believing that some questions — for instance regarding his sexual orientation — were out-of-line (there is an answer to that query, which the USC Shoah Foundation team does not deem inappropriate). On the other hand, in many cases, the organization noticed that being in front of a digital version of a real-person lessens the fear of asking certain difficult questions.
- Authenticity: none of the answers are edited, fragmented or manipulated in anyway to match the question being asked by the audience. So, if you ask Pinchas Gutter if he’s hopeful about the future, his response goes “my message to the youth of today is to be as tolerant and as accepting of all different human beings whatever religion whatever color whatever culture whatever their mode of living is and try and make this world a better place and that is my message that is why i tell my stories and that is why that’s what i hope the youth the leaders of the future will achieve…”. The wording reveals that the original question closest to that of the public must have been along the lines of “what do you want to say to the young generation?”
- Linguistics: the questions asked at the time of the recording needed to elicit usable soundbites. As such, they needed to be open-ended, avoid referring to the present (‘this year’, ‘today’, etc. since the testimony may be watch years from now), and complete (e.g. If asked “what do you want to say to the young generation?”, his answer could not begin with “I tell them to”… in which case, depending on the audience’s inquiry — say “are you hopeful about the future?” — we might not know who the ‘them’ refers to). This meant that in some cases, the question needed to be asked multiple times, in slightly different ways. This is a demanding process for the person giving their testimony.
- Dissemination: the USC Shoah Foundation is currently experimenting with how to package this experience. Some of their consideration include:
- what kind of historical and contextual knowledge is required to engage with the interactive testimonies?
- what kind of space is most conducive to a meaningful interaction?
- how does the size of the audience affect the experience?
- how to ensure that the ‘cool factor’ of the new technology doesn’t obscure the content of the testimonies?
- what happens after the viewing? how do you help the audience cope with what they’ve learn, reflect on the experience and the testimonies, and move forward?
