This post, originally entitled “Exploratory Topic Modelling Using R”, was first published by Mike Bryant in June 2016 on a now deactivated blog. We have since updated it to include more data and to explore similar tools in Python. The original blog post (Bryant, 2016) is still accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Continuing Read More
Category: Digital Methods
Mapping the Archive: The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Refugee Map
‘Place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning.’1 Introduction The Wiener Holocaust Library is the UK’s largest archive of personal papers related to Jewish refugees from Read More
What can I do with this messy spreadsheet? Converting from Excel sheets to fully compliant EAD-XML files
Many Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) face difficulties sharing their collections meta-data in standardised and sustainable ways due to the absence of in-house Information Technology (IT) support or capabilities 1. This situation means that staff rely on more familiar general purpose office programs like text processors, spreadsheets, or low-code databases. However, while these tools Read More
Diplomatic Reports on the Holocaust – an EHRI Online Edition
In April of 1939, the American diplomat Ray Atherton, stationed in Sofia, reported to the Secretary of State that “there is no sympathy in Bulgaria for the anti-Jewish demonstrations of this organization ‚Workers of New Bulgaria‘,” which “is of foreign origin and is, it is believed, directly encouraged from Germany”.1 This assumption was mirrored by Read More
Left Behind – A Project Opening up Little Known Holocaust Histories as Well as New Tools
Almost half of the Jewish population of Belgium was murdered during the Holocaust. Complete families were wiped out, creating blind spots in the information available to reconstruct their stories in particular, but also certain aspects of the Belgian case in general. Personal documents of survivors and non-survivors thus become even more important to fill these Read More
EHRI in TEITOK
The Institute for Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL) put together an experimental interface for the EHRI digital editions, a corpus framework called TEITOK, as an alternative to the current interface in Omeka. Where the current interface of EHRI based is centered around documents, TEITOK is centered around texts. In many aspects, the TEITOK interface for Read More
Connecting the Records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission
“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
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
