“We were arrested at the Hungarian border and taken to the camp Stryi [a prisoner of war camp near Lviv in Ukraine], where we spent 12 days in prison. They brought a Jew to the camp, took everything he had, and gave him a rope to hang himself. The Germans didn’t pay attention to us Read More
Category: Digital Methods
More Watching, Less Searching: Repurposing Fortunoff Archive Metadata for Visual Searching
The Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) began building a Visual Search tool in 2019 in order to provide a simple overview of the Fortunoff Archive’s collection and enable quick filtering and discovery of relevant testimonies. Uninitiated researchers approaching Fortunoff’s collection, in particular undergraduate students tasked with using Read More
Spatial Queries and the First Deportations from Slovakia
As a part of my research on the history of refugee no man’s land at the end of the 1930s in East-Central Europe, I examined the deportations of Jews from Slovakia in November 1938, many of whom were subsequently trapped along the demarcation line between the Czecho-Slovak and Hungarian posts. The little known and extremely Read More
Integrating new data from Yad Vashem’s archives into the EHRI portal – methods and practice
Introduction The export activity of Yad Vashem had two goals. Firstly, we wanted to update the Yad Vashem content on the EHRI portal, improving the quality of the descriptions and adding a few new records. Secondly, we wanted to prepare the infrastructure to have a sustainable connection to the EHRI portal, allowing content updates and Read More
Georeferencing Service for Archives
Archives often have the wish to make their collections searchable and findable on a map like Google Maps or Open Street Map. This is a nice interface for users on which they can zoom in on a specific geographic location and see what collections are linked to it. This promise of a user friendly geographic Read More
BeGrenzte Flucht: integrating Austrian and Czechoslovak documentation on 1938 refugees
The journalist Richard Bermann was one of the many Austrians threatened by the Nazi regime who tried in vain to flee on the night train to Czechoslovakia the night of the 11th March 1938. After approximately 180 Austrian refugees were turned back at the border, Bermann appealed via telegram to the Czechoslovakian president for the refugees Read More
Using Named Entity Recognition to Enhance Access to a Museum Catalog
Introduction Digital technologies are successfully applied in cultural heritage projects supporting digitization of cultural objects, metadata creation, metadata maintenance, creation of digital infrastructure for cultural heritage research and many others. When we discuss archival digital textual content, some of the most imminent tasks are related to automatic metadata generation, searchability and preservation and these can Read More
The Learning Curve in Sharing Data with the EHRI Project: The Example of a Memorial Site, Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen
Kazerne Dossin – Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights opened its doors on 1st December 2012. The institute inherited its archival collections from its predecessor, the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR). The JMDR had been inaugurated in 1995 at the former SS-Sammellager Mecheln, better known as the Dossin barracks, Read More
Person Records Linking in the USHMM Survivors and Victims Database
Archivists, historians and relatives of people who’ve been involved in the Holocaust all struggle with the same problem when exploring the vast sea of data related to that epoch – they are not able to obtain all documents related to a given person. There could be several reasons for that – the documents are spread Read More
quod: A Tool for Querying and Organising Digitised Historical Documents
In this blog post we introduce a prototype tool for OCRing and querying digitised historical documents, quod, which can be used for organising large collections of such documents.The work described represents a proof of concept, where the feasibility of the idea is demonstrated. Background The archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Read More
