Summer 2012 - USC Shoah Foundationsfi.usc.edu/sites/default/files/docfiles/PastForward_Summer2012_0.pdf · the digest of the usc shoah foundation institute for visual history and

PastForward

Technology&Testimony

New Dimensions

T H E D I G E S T O F T H E U S C S H O A H F O U N D A T I O N I N S T I T U T E F O R V I S U A L H I S T O R Y A N D E D U C A T I O N

Summer 2012

Closing the Digital DivideAn interview with Comcast Chairman & CEO brian l. roberts

When Everything ChangedHolocaust survivor and filmmaker branko lustig

Scholarship in aDigital WorldNew modes of publishing tara mcpherson

Our MissionTo overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry — and the suffering they cause — through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies

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Summer 2012

USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and EducationLeavey Library 650 West 35th Street, Suite 114 Los Angeles, CA 90089-2571 Change Service Requested

USCDornsifeDana and David DornsifeCollege of Letters, Arts and Sciences

USCUniversityofSouthern California

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ENSURE THE INSTITU TE’S VISUAL HISTORY ARCHIVE CAN EDUCATE AND INSPIRE FOR GENERATIONS TO COME.

Board of CouncilorsSteven SpielbergHonorary Chair

Edgar M. BronfmanHonorary Co-chair

Renée Crown Honorary Co-chair

Lew WassermanHonorary Co-chair in Memoriam

Robert J. KatzChair

Susan CrownVice chair

Harry RobinsonVice chair

Wallis AnnenbergRussel BernardGerald Breslauer* Joel CitronJerome Coben* Stephen CozenDavid EismanPhyllis EpsteinEmanuel Gerard* Eric GreenbergJoel GreenbergMarcy B. GringlasMarc GrossmanYossie HollanderWilliam LauderLee LibermanSkip PaulBruce RamerMichael RutmanMickey ShapiroTad TaubeErna ViterbiHarold Williams*

* Emeritus Board member

Founding Executive DirectorsJune BeallorJames Moll

Founding Advisory CommitteeKaren KushellBranko LustigGerald R. Molen

Executive StaffStephen D. SmithExecutive Director

Kim SimonManaging Director

Sam GustmanChief Technology Officer

Karen JungblutDirector of Research and Documentation

Steven KlappholzExecutive Director of Development

Anita PaceDirector of Technology

Kori StreetDirector of Programs

Ari ZevDirector of Administration

USC

SHOAH

FOUNDATION

INSTITUTE

FOR VISUAL HISTORYAND EDUCATION


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PastForwardSummer 2012

Essays

10 MEMORY AND LOCATION

Testimony on LocationBy Scott Lindenbaum

11 SPACE AND TIME

Geo-Immersive LearningBy Cyrus Shahabi, Ali Khodaei, and Barak Fishbain

12 TESTIMONY AND MATHEMATICS

A Surprising QuantumBy Michael Hintze

13 TESTIMONY AND SOFTWARE DESIGN

From the POV of a Programmer By Mills Chang

17 MEMORIALIZATION AND TECHNOLOGY

Building a Tree of TestimonyBy Mark Rothman

27 THE GENOCIDE IN RWANDA

For Rwanda, for the WorldBy Freddy Mutanguha

28 SEARCHING THE ARCHIVE

Searching Their VoicesBy Jan Hajič, Pavel Ircing, and Josef Psutka

29 PRESERVING THE TESTIMONIES

Preservation Bit by BitBy Sam Gustman

Voices from the Archive

6 When Everything ChangedHolocaust Survivor Branko Lustig

Departments

2 Contributors

5 Executive Director’s Letter

30 News & Events

Features

NEW MODES OF PUBLISHING

14 Scholarship in a Digital World As digital publishing transforms scholarship, media-rich resourceswill become more important than ever. By Tara McPherson

SPECIAL FEATURE

18 Closing the Digital DivideA Conversation with Comcast Chairman & CEO Brian L. Roberts Interviewed by Stephen D. Smith

TESTIMONY IN THE FUTURE

22 New Dimensions in TestimonyHow new technologies—and interview questions—will contribute to the dialogue between students and survivors.By Heather Maio, David Traum, and Paul Debevec

“The question is,‘What can we do to improve education so the next generation has a better chance of success?’”Comcast Chairman & CEO Brian L. Roberts, page 18

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Meet the authors of this issue of PastForward

Mills Chang is a ProgrammerAnalyst for the USC SchoahFoundation Institute. He wasborn in Taiwan and earned hisM.S. in computer science atUSC. Chang is the former Senior Software Engineer for IntraTel, and a former SystemAnalyst for GlaxoSmithKline.

Paul Debevec is the AssociateDirector for Graphics Researchat the University of SouthernCalifornia’s Institute for CreativeTechnologies (ICT) and is a Research Associate Professor in the USC Computer ScienceDepartment. Aside from beingan Academy Award winner, he leads the Graphics Laboratoryat ICT working on the develop-ment of several Light Stage systems that capture and simu-late how people and objects appear under real-world illumi-nation. He has earned degreesin math and computer engineer-ing at the University of Michi-gan, in 1992, and a Ph.D. inComputer Science from UCBerkeley, in 1996.

Barak Fishbain is an AssociateDirector of the University ofSouthern California’s IntegratedMedia Systems Center (IMSC),and Research Associate at theViterbi School of Engineering.Fishbain earned his Ph.D. at Tel-Aviv University’s School ofElectrical Engineering in 2008.

There, he also earned an M.S. in electrical engineering in2004. His B.S. in electrical engineering is from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology(1998). His research focuses oncombinatorial optimization andgraph theory-based methods for pattern recognition in multi-dimensional data sets. This includes environmental moni-toring, traffic data, sensor net-works, and multi-spectralimages and videos.

Sam Gustman is the Institute’sChief Technology Officer. He hasbeen with the organization since1994, and in 2006 he oversawthe transfer of the Visual HistoryArchive to USC. He is responsi-ble for the archive’s operationsand preservation, and his officeprovides archival access andtechnical support for institu-tions around the world. Gustmanis the inventor of 11 patents ondigital library technology for the Institute, and he has beenthe primary investigator on National Science Foundation research projects with a cumula-tive funding total of more than$8 million.

Jan Hajič is a full Professor of Computational Linguisticsand the Head of the Institute ofFormal and Applied Linguisticsat the School of Computer Sci-ence of the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Hisinterests cover morphology of

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page 29 Chief Technology Officer Sam Gustman (standing) with Georgiana Gomez, Video Archive and Production Specialist

PastForward brings together many voicesaround issues related to the educational andscholarly use of genocide eyewitness testimony.Whether survivors or their descendants, teach-ers or students, scholars, historians, or film-makers, the variety of their experiences andopinions is a sample of the lively milieu of critical thought and discourse emerging aroundthe USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s VisualHistory Archive.

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Summer 2012

Contributors

inflective languages, machinetranslation, deep language un-derstanding, and the applicationof statistical methods in naturallanguage processing in general.He also has extensive experi-ence in building annotated lan-guage resources. His workexperience includes both indus-trial research (IBM ResearchYorktown Heights) and acade-mia (Charles University, Prague,and Johns Hopkins University,Baltimore, Maryland, USA). He has published more than 80 papers, and he has been the PI or Co-PI of several national and internationalgrants and projects.

Michael Hintze recentlygraduated summa cum laudefrom Macaulay Honors Collegewith a B.A. in mathematics andcomputer science. As a user experience designer at Nokia, he created state-of-the-art weband mobile experiences forNokia Store. Hintze is currentlyworking on defining the user experience for e-learning appli-cations for the Apollo Group and completing his master’s in Information Management Systems at the University of California, Berkeley.

Pavel Ircing is an AssistantProfessor at the Department ofCybernetics and a researcher at the Department of Interdisci-plinary Activities, University ofWest Bohemia, Pilsen, CzechRepublic. His research interestsinclude language modeling andinformation retrieval, especiallyin the context of large audio-vi-sual archives. He was deeply in-volved in the MALACH project,both in the development of theautomatic speech-recognitionsystems and the consequent in-formation retrieval engines. Hecurrently participates in severalprojects dealing with automaticprocessing of audiovisualarchives, including the projectaimed at improving retrievalperformance in the Malach Vi-sual History Centre in Prague.

Ali Khodaei is currently work-ing toward his Ph.D. in com-puter science at the Universityof Southern California, where heis a research assistant workingon web search, information re-trieval and geospatial databases.He received his B.S. in com-puter engineering in 2003 andhis M.S. in computer sciencefrom the University of Califor-nia, Irvine, in 2006. He hasworked as a researcher/devel-oper/manager for several com-panies and research institutes,including Microsoft, SamsungR&D Center, and VESystems.

Scott Lindenbaum is the Co-Founder of Broadcastr, aniPhone/Android/web applica-tion that delivers rich media tosmartphones based on location.The user’s movement throughthe world acts as a search query,serving up relevant, entertainingmedia specific to their location.For 10 years Scott was a half-pipe snowboard competitorsponsored by Burton Snow-

boards. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from BrooklynCollege, where he studied underPulitzer Prize-winner MichaelCunningham. Broadcastr hasgarnered national coverage onCNN, MSNBC, and FOXNews,and has appeared in the NewYork Times, Wall Street Journal,Washington Post, Wired, and in the Huffington Post and numerous other outlets.

Heather Maio is Director ofConscience Display, an exhibi-tion company that specializes inHolocaust-related exhibits. Shehas produced several travelingand permanent exhibitions onthe Holocaust. Maio specializesin intergenerational issues witha particular emphasis on sur-vivors, their families, and their legacy.

Mills Chang, page 13 Summer 2012 3


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Contributors

Tara McPherson is AssociateProfessor of Gender and CriticalStudies at the USC School ofCinematic Arts, and Co-Directorof the USC Center for Transfor-mative Scholarship. Her newmedia research focuses on is-sues of convergence, gender,and race, as well as on the devel-opment of new tools and para-digms for digital publishing,learning, and authorship. She isthe Founding Editor of Vectors,

and an editor for the MacArthur-supported International Journalof Learning and Media. McPher-son is author of “ReconstructingDixie: Race, Gender and Nostal-gia in the Imagined South,”among other works. She isworking with colleagues fromother universities and with aca-demic presses and archives toexplore new modes of scholar-ship for visual culture research.

Freddy Mutanguha, who losthis parents and four sisters in the1994 Rwandan Tutsi genocide, is Director of the Kigali GenocideMemorial and former SecretaryGeneral of IBUKA, the umbrellaorganization representing Rwan-dan survivors. A graduate of theKigali Institute of Education, Mutanguha has become a lead-ing voice for human-rights edu-cation in Rwanda, lecturinginternationally about the effectsof the genocide and post-conflictreconstruction. In 2011, he gavehis testimony to the USC ShoahFoundation Institute.

Josef Psutka is a Professorand the Head of the Departmentof Cybernetics, University ofWest Bohemia, Pilsen, CzechRepublic. His research interestsinclude automatic speech recog-nition and other areas related tohuman computer interaction.He has published two mono-graphs (in Czech) concerningcomputer speech processingand more than 80 papers in ref-ereed journals and conferences.He was one of the principal in-vestigators of the MALACH(Multilingual Access to LargeSpoken Archives) project, lead-ing the team responsible for au-tomatic transcription of Czech,Slovak, Russian, Polish, andHungarian testimonies.

Mark Rothman is Executive Director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Rothman earned a B.A. fromColumbia University and anM.F.A. from the USC School of Cinema-Television. After a career as a video producer/director, Rothman served as

Holocaust Services Advocate atBet Tzedek Legal Services, help-ing survivors to obtain repara-tions and restitution. Rothmanhas held community leadershippositions with organizations thatinclude the Center for NonprofitManagement, the Federation ofJewish Men’s Clubs, and B’Nai-David Judea Congregation. Rothman conducted approxi-mately 50 USC Shoah Founda-tion Institute interviews.

Cyrus Shahabi is a Professorand the Director of the Informa-tion Laboratory (InfoLAB) at theComputer Science Departmentand also the Director of theNSF’s Integrated Media SystemsCenter (IMSC) at the Universityof Southern California. He isalso the CTO and co-founder of a USC spin-off, GeosembleTechnologies. Dr. Shahabi is arecipient of the 2009 ACM Distinguished Scientist Awardand the 2003 U.S. PresidentialEarly Career Award for Scien-tists and Engineers (PECASE).

David Traum is a principalscientist at the Institute for ICT,and research faculty in the USCComputer Science. At ICT,Traum leads the Natural Lan-guage Dialogue Group, whichresearches all aspects of naturallanguage dialogue. Traum’s re-search focuses on dialogue com-munication between human andartificial agents. He has au-thored more than 200 technicalarticles, is a Founding Editor of the journal Dialogue and Discourse, and is PresidentEmeritus of SIGDIAL, the inter-national special-interest groupin discourse and dialogue. He earned his Ph.D. in com-puter science at the Universityof Rochester, in 1994.

Editorial TeamStephen D. SmithKim SimonJemal YoungJenna LeventhalTalia Cohen

DesignRick Simner Design

PrintingColorGraphics, Inc.


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PastForward Executive Director’s Letter

A basic truth about technology: Its power depends on its purpose. By Stephen D. Smith

new dimensions

A Means to an End. We could dedicate an entire issue of PastForward to the whir and whistle of the computer systems, software architecture,and web applications the USC Shoah Foundation Institute uses to disseminatethe testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses. In fact, there areas many programmers, network specialists, and education technologists work-ing with the Institute as there are historians, social scientists, or experts in thehumanities. But technology is not an end itself. What’s really interesting ishow the content of the testimonies is being optimized, through emerging tech-nologies and new media, to become the worldwide educational resource it wasalways intended to be.

In the following pages, we’ll read about 3-D testimonies and virtual spaceswhere Holocaust survivors’ memories will guide learners through the fourthdimension of time. Brian L. Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast, willshare his vision for bridging the “digital divide” in education—a vision thatput testimony within reach of millions of Comcast viewers through the latestiPad and Video On Demand technology. We’ll learn about the advantages thatonline publishing platforms will bring to testimony-based scholarship, andabout researchers in the Czech Republic who are pioneering a voice-recogni-tion approach to searching the Visual History Archive. We’ll even hear aboutan app that lets you stand in historic locations and learn from survivors whostood there before.

When a researcher or student searches the Visual History Archive, tens ofthousands of computing hours lie behind that search. This suggests a basictruth about technology: Its power depends on its purpose, and you are aboutto meet some of the people who specialize in the highly technical aspects ofaudiovisual scholarship and education. My challenge to them was to discusstheir work without baffling us with technical jargon. I think they’ve done agood job. I hope you’ll agree.

To all those team members, interns, and volunteers who have spent longhours glued to computer screens so that people around the world can reachdeeper into the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, thankyou; your skills help create humanity through testimony.



I REMEMBER THOSE DAYS when the ShoahFoundation first started. When I was on the setof Schindler’s List with Steven Spielberg, andother survivors were speaking to him; I couldsee how determined he was to ensure thattheir life histories were taken for the future,and before it was too late. As the testimoniescame in, I would spend hours and hours eachday reviewing them, especially those in Croat-ian. I was totally absorbed, as I could see his-tory coming alive before my very eyes.

Today I am interested in what all of this means for the future. As a survivorof the Holocaust, I want the Shoah Foundation Institute to push the bound-aries of technology not for the sake of it, but to make sure that we fulfill thepromise we made to the survivors in the Visual History Archive. We alwayssaid that the testimonies would be kept in perpetuity, which requires hugetechnological effort. We also said that we would teach from them for genera-tions to come, which in a world which is wired for the Internet, means bring-ing the Visual History Archive directly to their screens.

As a filmmaker, I am interested in how we communicate the story of theShoah. It is clear to me that the next generation will tell their own story in theirown words with whatever means they have at their disposal. Our job is not todissuade them from using their voice and the technology at their fingertips butrather to encourage them to do it with care, with dignity, and humanity.

Branko Lustig

The next generation will tell their own story intheir own words with whatever means they have attheir disposal. Our job is not to dissuade themfrom using their voice and the technology at theirfingertips but rather to encourage them to do itwith care, with dignity, and humanity.

photograph by kim fox


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centration camp in Austria. “There were Jewsfrom all over,” Branko remembers.

One winter day, the prisoners were loadedonto a train bound for Auschwitz.

When they arrived and the men were dividedfrom the women and children, Branko—whowas tall for his age—was put in line with themen. Vilma had said that her 11-year-old sonwas in fact 16.

“My mother went on the other side. And whenI turned around, she wasn’t there anymore.”

Branko didn’t witness many of the horrorsof Auschwitz; his first encounter with death oc-curred later that winter, when he was sent to awork camp in nearby Fürstengrube. “When wearrived there,” he says, “everything started tochange.”

That first day at Fürstengrube, Branko andthe other new arrivals were lined up in front ofa gallows where six ropes hung. After aboutthree hours, six prisoners were brought forward.

“They shouted in Yiddish, ‘Don’t forget us!Remember us!’” Branko says, recalling theirlast words. It was the first time he saw some-one die.

“And [they] gave us some food, and I waseating this food beside the gallows.”

Branko was put to work in a coal mine, lead-ing a blind horse that hauled water for the la-borers, then hauling bricks and cement.Beatings were commonplace; “There was al-ways some Capo who beat you up if you [wentslowly].” Prisoners who became too weak or illto work were taken away. “And from these se-lections, everybody knew…that the tracks aretaking them to be killed.”

For Branko, one of the worst experiences oc-curred on the evening of Yom Kippur. It wasraining, and the prisoners had been gatheredtogether in a roll call area. While one prisonerwas beaten, another was forced to play on a fid-dle the melody of the Kol Nidre prayer. Brankoremembers how the other prisoners wept. “Myreligion stopped somewhere on this Kol Nidrenight,” he says, “on this Yom Kippur night...Isaw those people standing there…under thisopen sky. This guy was playing this prayer, andnothing happened.”

The hardships of Fürstengrube took a heavytoll on Branko. In the spring of 1944, he becamevery ill and was selected for removal from thecamp. “I tried to escape,” he tells Jerry. “And Iwas running through the camp, but in the campthere was a group of Jews; they were called the‘fire brigade’…but they were also police. And Iremember two of them were running behindme. They [caught] me and put me on the truck.”

Branko was transported to Auschwitz II-Birke-

Nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and other witnesses gave their testimonies to the Institute, from 56 countries and in 32 languages. The Visual History Archive is filled with more than 100,000 hours of unique life stories. It would take more than 12 years to watch every person's testimony, and it would beimpossible to share all their stories in PastForward. Here is aglimpse from the Visual History Archive into the life of survivorBranko Lustig, who is a member of the Institute's Founding Advisory Committee. We invite you to view his entire testimony on our website at dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/voicesfromthearchive.


LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 1999. Film producerJerry Molen is sitting with his friend and fellowproducer of Schindler’s List. A Shoah Foundationvideographer is recording.

“Can we have your name, please?” Jerry asks.“Branko Lustig,” the man replies. “L-u-s-t-i-g.”

His story began in 1932, in Osijek, Yugoslavia. “I remember the town quitewell,” Branko smiles. He recalls that his father, Mirko, was the head waiter ina big hotel, and that his mother, Vilma, sometimes threw parties for his friendsfrom elementary school. Her parents also lived in Osijek; Branko remembersgoing to their house on Friday nights for Shabbat dinner.

“We had a good life,” he says.Two months before Branko’s ninth birthday, the Axis powers invaded Yu-

goslavia. Osijek fell into the hands of Ustaša, a Croatian nationalist group andNazi puppet regime. “They were very antisemitic. They started killing Jewsimmediately, and Serbs. There were a lot of Serbs in Osijek.”

As persecution of Osijek’s Jews intensified, Branko began overhearing hisparents talking late into the night about whether they should leave town. Thenhis father was arrested. Though his release was secured with the help offriends, the Lustigs knew they could no longer stay in Osijek.

One night, Branko and his parents slipped across a river in a small boat andjourneyed to Čakovec, the Hungarian-occupied city where Mirko’s motherlived. The situation was purportedly better for Jews in Čakovec, and at first therumors seemed true; Branko’s parents were able to enroll him in a localCatholic school, and he remembers being able to attend synagogue. But hewas bullied at school, and the maltreatment he suffered grew increasinglyworse; meanwhile, anti-Jewish measures were making life more and more dif-ficult for his parents as well. His father was required to report to the police ona weekly basis, and after one such appearance in 1942, Mirko did not return.Only after the war would Branko discover what had happened to his father.

In late 1942 or early 1943, the police came for Vilma and Branko. They weredeported to Nagykanizsa in Hungary, and then sent to the Wiener Neustadt con-

Branko Lustig Born June 10, 1932, Osijek, Yugoslavia

Interviewed 1999, Los Angeles, California

When EverythingChangedA Holocaust Survivor Remembers



nau; upon arrival, he escaped from the truck thatbrought him from Fürstengrube and mixed inwith other Jews who had arrived that day. “I sawthis enormous field, and lots and lots of bar-racks…wires; this terrible smell of the camp.” Heremembers seeing the chimneys of the crema-toria. “There was an enormous line of nakedpeople…it was terribly cold. It was raining.”

Then, for some reason—to this day, Brankodoes not know why—he and the other prison-ers who arrived that day were taken toAuschwitz I, where he was given a number.“My number is A-3317,” he tells Jerry;the videographer captures the numberstill visible on his forearm.

Summer, 1944. “That was a very hardsummer,” Branko remembers. He sawpeople being beaten to death, even cruci-fied and left to hang as a warning to oth-ers. As time wore on, Branko becameknown as “Benjamin”—the youngest ofbiblical Jacob’s sons—because he was somuch younger than others in the camp.He was beaten regularly by his captors; hewas mistreated by older prisoners as well.

Months passed. As the days grewcolder, food became increasingly scarce;prisoners were often given nothing toeat but a scrap of salami or a piece of afrog. That winter, the nights were filledwith the sounds of battle. The Russianswere coming.

In January 1945, Branko and theother prisoners were forced to marchfrom the camp.

“We were marching all night. Andthere was snow falling, and there was alot of shooting behind us,” he recalls.“Some people fell down, and I remember theywere shot immediately.” They arrived at a trainstation, where each car was loaded with morethan 120 prisoners, each of whom was givenonly a scrap of bread to sustain them for thethree to four days it took to reach the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp near Nordhausen, Germany.There, Branko was sent to work in an under-ground factory; but the Allies were closing in,and the prisoners were soon relocated fartherfrom the front—this time to Bergen-Belsen.

“This terrible stink came from the camp,”Branko says of the place he describes as “Dante’sInferno,” where more than 50,000 people died.He contracted typhus and began sleeping underthe barracks at night, afraid that if he couldn’tget up in the morning, he’d be taken out withthe dead to be burned. “I was at the end of myphysical and spiritual forces and energy.”

Decades later, sitting with Jerry, Branko re-

turns to those last days and nights at Bergen-Belsen. “We saw fire. The sky was red. And weheard bombardments and we heard planes,and everybody knew, ‘It’s not long. Any daynow, we will be liberated.’” By then the Nazishad stopped coming to the camp altogether.Dying of thirst, the prisoners began boilingand drinking their own urine. “This was thecamp where Nazi organization failed.”

In April 1945, British Armed Forces liber-ated Bergen-Belsen. “I was lying by a window,”Branko remembers, “and I was in a delirium.

I had a high fever…I was thinking that I’mdying—that I’m dead already.” As he lay there,he heard music and saw what he thought wereangels: a group of Scottish pipers.

Branko and his mother were soon reunited;upon her arrival at Auschwitz, Vilma had beenimmediately transferred to a munitions factoryin Germany, where she had worked as a spe-cialist for the duration of the war. When Brankowas well enough to travel, they returned toČakovec in the hope that Mirko might be wait-ing for them.

“There was only one uncle,” Branko remem-bers, “and an empty house.”

Soon after their return to Čakovec, Vilma re-ceived an urgent message from a man on hisdeathbed. She found him with a priest at hisside; he wanted desperately to tell her some-thing about her husband.

It had happened only a few months earlier,

in a Hungarian labor camp. During roll callone day, one of the prisoners laughed. An offi-cer overheard and demanded that the culpritidentify himself. Nobody did.

The officer threatened to kill every secondperson in the lineup until someone confessed.At that point, a man stepped forward and theofficer shot him. It was Mirko.

Then the dying man told Vilma that he, notMirko, was the one who had laughed.

“And that’s how my father died,” Branko says.He and his mother left Čakovec and relocated

to Zagreb. Branko finished school anddecided to study chemistry, until his lifetook an unexpected turn: He discoveredacting. After graduating from the Acad-emy of Dramatic Art, University of Za-greb, in 1955, he began working on filmshoots, learning on set and working hisway up the ranks. It was the beginningof a career in film production that hasspanned decades and earned Branko twoAcademy Awards, including his first, forSchindler’s List.

Branko speaks about his career; hetalks about his wife, Mirijana, and aboutproposing to her while working on Fid-dler on the Roof: “The whole crew was atthe wedding.” He smiles when Jerry askshim about their daughter, Sara, and re-flects on what having a child means tohim as a survivor. Soon their conversa-tion turns to Branko’s return toAuschwitz, this time as a filmmaker.

“I never had that connection with realdeath in Auschwitz,” he says. “But whenI entered Birkenau and came to this gateand saw this big, enormous emptiness,

it was again winter. And I remember this mo-ment; I felt this thing; I felt that I am hungryagain, and I felt the stench, the smoke, withoutseeing it…I was crying. I couldn’t get through.”

More than two hours have passed sinceBranko and Jerry first sat down together. Miri-jana will soon join her husband on camera,and Branko’s testimony will close with still im-ages of the photographs, postwar artifacts, andawards that also tell the story of his life. Butfirst, Jerry asks him how the Holocaust has af-fected his perception of humanity.

Branko replies that he has been able to forgive.“I hope that people will one day love each

other and that this will never happen again;that’s why I was so involved with this Shoahproject. Because I think that these tapes—whatwe’ve made—they will help the people to loveeach other and to forgive…and to live, some-how, in a new world.”

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Branko Lustig as a child



Memory and location

you are. It links multimedia to locations andturns your smartphone into a guide to the world.

With Broadcastr, the Institute would be ableto upload testimony and associate it with his-torical sites. For example, if someone with theBroadcastr app visited Auschwitz-Birkenau,testimony of those who had survived the campcould start playing automatically based on thevisitor’s location. And if someone couldn’ttravel to Poland, they could take a virtual touron the Broadcastr website. Either way, it wouldbe possible to give very specific context to allthe memories in the Visual History Archive.

The project is now a reality. More than 50testimonies from survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau are on Broadcastr.

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute is aBroadcastr partner, but anyone can contributestories to our ever-growing memory map. It’sa social technology, but I’m not a technologist;the idea for Broadcastr came out of my back-ground as a writer, teacher, and storyteller.

To return to Proust: Remembering meansfinding ways to remind ourselves to remember.The phrase “never forget” is the inverse of thissame idea. We create rituals (out of which growtraditions) to ensure that our individual andcollective memories are regularly brought tothe forefront of our thinking. Sometimes these

Testimony onLocation

By Scott LindenbaumYou are always somewhere. By using Broadcastr to watch

location-specific testimony on your mobile device, history

and memory will meet you while you’re there.

IN CHAPTER ONE of the first book of In Search ofLost Time, Marcel Proust’s modernist epic abouthow we make and access memory, the narrator ishaving a madeleine with his tea. The experienceof dipping the small French cakeinto the tea triggers a wave of

memories that takes him all the way back to other unre-membered moments of his childhood. After 30 pages ofreflection and remembrance, we return to the narrator,madeleine still in hand, his tea just beginning to cool.

Proust began his novel in 1909, and it would not be anoverstatement to say that his investigation of involuntarymemory became a critical concern in 20th century West-ern culture. Involuntary memory is the idea that recollec-tion is often triggered by quotidian cues stumbled uponduring the course of ordinary life. Memories leap out atus. Taken in the context of collective memory, or culturalhistory, particularly the tragic variety, what could be moreimportant than remembering?

I had an idea. I wanted to publish Holocaust survivortestimony in a completely new way: to the location it de-scribes. Members of my extended family had given tes-timony to the Institute; they had jumped from trains inPoland, and I thought it would be incredible to putvoices like theirs back at the sites where these eventshad happened. What if visitors to these meaningful locations could tap into that testimony? What if theemotional and historical context of the place couldcome from the survivors themselves?

Broadcastr, a mobile app I’d just created for the iPhoneand Android, could help make this concept a reality.

Broadcastr creates intimate and immersive experiencesby unlocking photos, audio, and video relevant to where

Scott Lindenbaum is the Co-Founder of

Broadcastr, an iPhone/Android/web application

that delivers rich media to smartphones based

on location. For a full biography, see page 3.



triggers take the form of symbols, like theSeder plate, or a crucifix. Time of day or timeof year can be powerful triggers, particularly forpersonal memory.

How we remember, and the little remindersthat keep certain events fresh in our memory,have undergone a shift in the digital age. Today,we have public, social, and digital systems ofstorage organized by theme, time, and rele-vance (most of us call this the Internet). Googlehelps us sort through all this information. Face-book reflects the state of content organizationand its relationship to personal memory almostperfectly. The famous Facebook wall, where allthe media related to a user is publicly stored, isno longer a wall at all but a timeline of media.

If we agree that this is the digital age, thenperhaps we are at the dawn of its mobile epoch;computing on smartphones and tablets meanscomputing on the go. A new factor has becomerelevant to how we store and access media thatis inexplicably linked to our process of creatingand triggering individual and cultural memo-ries. That new factor is location.

More and more people are walking aroundwith memory devices in their pockets and back-packs, and these devices know where they areat any given moment. Media can be deliveredbased on locative criteria. That media can helpus remember to remember. It can connect usmore deeply to the world around us. And in thecase of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, itcan bring voices to spaces that can be difficultto contextualize, such as those that were con-centration camps during the Holocaust.

Historical documentation has always takeninto account location. However, using GPStechnology and cell-tower triangulation, we areable for the first time to take into account wherea person is at any given moment and deliver tothem relevant media based on this information,in turn creating a more meaningful, intimate,and immersive experience of place. In the ter-restrial world, we already attempt to do this byerecting monuments, putting up informativeplaques, publishing pamphlets and maps, andby preserving historical sites. Now imagine ifevery place on Earth could have associated withit an archive of media content stored invisiblyin the air and accessible at any time. In this sce-nario, which Broadcastr seeks to make a reality,the only search input necessary for having a rel-evant, powerful experience is simple: You justhave to be somewhere. And you are alwayssomewhere. Now history and memory willcome to meet you while you’re there.

Space and time

ONE OF THE MOST interesting developments ineducation is the growing use of 4-D interfaces. Toclarify, 4-D “virtual spaces” are 3-D buildings andplaces built up from original maps and plans,which change with time, making a fourth dimen-sion. It means that if you view the space as it wasin 1940, it will be different from 1944 and verydifferent from the current day.

These computer-generated “virtual spaces” en-able immersive learning experiences. This mightsound like something from a video game, andthat is not without reason. The architecture usedto generate lifelike screen-based images was pi-oneered by the gaming industry. Nonetheless,the technology’s potential applications go far be-yond entertainment, and can include the testi-monies in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

Our research, conducted at the IntegratedMedia Systems Center at the University of South-ern California, introduces a new computing con-cept, called Geo-Immersion. This was inventedand is being developed at the center, which is onthe same campus as the USC Shoah FoundationInstitute. Geo-immersion is the capture of real-world spaces into a computer-generated replicaof the real world. Using geo-immersion, we aim

to place the testimonies of Holocaust survivors within a 4-D space, such as aninterface that would allow a student or researcher to “walk” through a simulatedlocation—a historical site, for instance—observing how it looked 70 years agocompared to how it looks today, all while listening to relevant testimony aboutthe location and the events that occurred there.

The user will have a totally different experience as they try to understandthe testimony in relation to places, rather than as a whole life history. Geo-immersive spaces not only create a different learning environment but alsobring out information that might have been overlooked through conven-tional research methods. And in cases where multiple witnesses describeda specific location, their testimonies could even be linked together to provideadditional layers of context.

Studying Holocaust testimony in 4-D depends on many new technologies.These include the systems to build the geo-immersive space, place the testi-

Geo-ImmersiveLearning

By Cyrus Shahabi, Ali Khodaei, and Barak FishbainHow the Visual History Archive is helping computer scientists

pioneer a new technology—and what that technology could

mean for how we explore history.

4-D “virtual spaces” are 3-D buildings and spaces

that change with time, making a fourth dimen-

sion. For full biographies of Cyrus Shahabi, Ali

Khodaei, Barak Fishbain, and other contributors

to this issue of PastForward, see page 2.


EVERY SUMMER, the UCLA Institute for AppliedMathematics hosts a program called Research inIndustrial Projects (RIPS). RIPS allows under-graduate students to work on real-world researchprojects that are sponsored by industry or thepublic sector; I was part of a team that workedon finding new ways to search and explore theUSC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual His-tory Archive.

Our main contacts at the Institute were itsChief Technology Officer, Sam Gustman, andProgrammer Leo Hsu. Sam and Leo not onlygave us access to the data in the Visual HistoryArchive; their vision for what the project couldaccomplish and their advocacy for end usershelped guide us from the very beginning.

Our primary goal was to find new ways tosearch and explore the archive. When I think ofthe challenge we faced, I’m reminded of JorgeLuis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel,”in which an infinitely large collection of booksis unusable because no method exists for work-ing through the glut of information. LikeBorges’s fictional library, the Visual HistoryArchive contains a vast amount of information;we hoped to help organize it and uncover novel

ways to connect the stories within the testimonies.For purposes of information retrieval, various methods have been developed

to search for documents, for information within documents, and for metadataabout documents. My team worked on ways to “relate” (group and organize)keyword data to support information retrieval. With only six weeks to conductour research, complete our project, and submit a final paper on our processand findings, the biggest challenge we faced was deciding how to make the


monial content within the space, and presentit in an interactive and searchable fashion. Toillustrate just how complex the challenges are,consider that we need to use text, space, andtime features to “rank” the testimonies so thatsearches yield the most relevant results. Key-word-based ranking is a well-studied problemby companies that design search engines, butranking based on time and place is an openproblem yet to be solved.

Developing a 4-D interface to the testi-monies means first dealing with these prob-lems. To tackle them, we have designed ahybrid index structure and two algorithms toindex and rank information, using data fromthe Institute’s Visual History Archive to testtheir validity. Furthermore, the question of howto place content like the testimonies into a his-torical space was used to introduce the difficul-ties of such problems to young scientists.Graduates were tasked with building a proto-type search engine that required students to ad-dress all aspects of the problem. Studies likethese will not only advance the computer sci-ences as students learn to think about suchproblems; they will also transform how westudy the Holocaust and conduct research inthe 21st century.

For further information see: Ali Khodaei, CyrusShahabi, and Chen Li, “Hybrid Indexing and Seam-less Ranking of Spatial and Textual Features of WebDocuments,” DEXA 2010; developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/; code.google.com/apis/maps/

Geo-immersive spaces create a different learning environment butalso bring out information that mighthave been overlooked through con-ventional research methods. And in cases where multiple witnessesdescribed a specific location, theirtestimonies could even be linked together to provide additional layers of context.

Testimony and mathematics

A SurprisingQuantum

By Michael HintzeThe Visual History Archive contains a vast amount

of information. We hoped to help organize it and uncover

novel ways to connect the stories within the testimonies.

The above diagram illustrates an indirect

relationship between search terms. Shavuot,

Passover, and Rosh Hashanah were often

spoken about together, while only the latter two

terms appear frequently with the term Jewish

religious observance. For researcher Michael

Hintze’s biography, see page 3.

PASSOVER

JEWISHRELIGIOUS

OBSERVANCES

ROSHHASHANAH

SHAVUOT



Testimony and software design

STUDENTS IN TAIWAN learn about the 1937 Nan-jing massacre but not much about the Holo-caust. I remember that there was a chapter inour history books. That was it.

I’m a software programmer for the USCShoah Foundation Institute. When the Institute

recruited me in 2008, I already knew about Schindler’s List, but I had no ideathat Steven Spielberg had been inspired to start an organization dedicated topreserving survivors’ memories, or that programmers like me would havesuch an important part to play in its educational mission.

At the pharmaceutical company where I worked in Taiwan, my focus wason the numbers; at the communications company in the United States, whereI spent 16 years before coming to the Institute, it was all about the technology.But at the Institute, even though I’m still writing software (you can’t imaginehow many lines of code I’ve written in the past four years), our focus is onhuman experiences—the life experiences of Holocaust survivors and otherwitnesses, and the learning experiences made possible through the educa-tional use of their testimonies.

As you might imagine, I spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen.One of the technologies I work on is the Visual History Archive, which is ac-cessible online at nearly 40 institutions worldwide. I also spend a lot of timeworking on the Institute’s newest software program, called IWitness, whichwe designed specifically for high schools and middle schools. IWitness will letteachers and students access 1,000 testimonies over the Internet.

Keeping the testimonies off the Internet would be like locking them in acloset. The memories of what survivors experienced, and their message foryounger generations, would be locked away as well. But because of the sensi-tive nature of testimony, we have designed IWitness to be a secure, teacher-monitored environment.

Much of the work I’ve done on IWitness has been based on user feedback.In addition to working with experts to ensure that the technology is suitablefor young people, we tested IWitness in classrooms across the United Statesto gather essential input from teachers and students; one of my responsibilitieshas been to ensure that IWitness reflects this input. As a developer, I want theprogram to run smoothly, and I want everything to function as users expect.But when I see a teacher use IWitness for the first time—when I see their ex-citement—that’s my idea of success.

I may not have learned much about the Holocaust when I was a schoolboyin Taiwan. But other students will, and it will be through technology that putssurvivor testimony within reach of the world.

From the POV of a Programmer

By Mills ChangUntil I came to the Institute, my focus

was on numbers and data. Now it’s about

human experiences.

Mills Chang, a Programmer Analyst for the

USC Shoah Foundation Institute, was born in

Taiwan and earned his M.S. in computer science

at USC. For a full biography, see page 2.

most effective use of time. We did succeed indeveloping two models for relating keyworddata: one for clustering testimonies with acommon theme, and another for examiningthe relationships between keywords to make iteasier to find testimonies with common narra-tives—for example, multiple testimonies thatdescribe a particular event—or keywords thatare indirectly related, such as Shavuot andRosh Hashanah.

As a mathematician, working with the Insti-tute’s Visual History Archive was interestingbecause of the sheer amount of informationcontained in the testimonies; it’s amazing howmuch opportunity there is for mining them todiscover trends and information that was al-ways there but was hidden. And as a youngprofessional, I was recently able to take what Ilearned about information retrieval and applyit as a researcher for Nokia. On a more per-sonal note, the testimonies were compelling intheir own right. Listening to survivors andother witnesses tell their stories is moving, andI was very proud to contribute to research thathas the potential to touch so many people.

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New Modes of publishing

As digital publishing transforms scholarship as we know it,

media-rich resources like the Visual History Archive will become

more important than ever.

By Tara McPherson

plements the vast array of visual sources available on the Inter-net. University researchers who work within this media-richworld are increasingly interested in creating scholarship thatuses visual materials in new ways. I work with a team of schol-ars and technology experts that is helping to create multimediascholarship. The USC Shoah Foundation Institute is a vital part-ner in this endeavor as the testimonies become available to uni-versity researchers around the globe.

Consider the scholar interested in conducting research in theVisual History Archive. Traditionally, she would study the videos,develop her analysis, and then present her findings in print. Thispublication is then read within a fairly small scholarly commu-nity. Now we have digital platforms that allow us to present suchresearch differently and to publish these results online with tes-

ScholarshipDigital Worldin a

illustration by brian stauffer

WE LIVE IN A RICHLY VISUAL WORLD. From thegigantic pulsing screens of contemporary urban

spaces to the small mobile screens we carryaround in purses and pockets, modern culture is

saturated in images. While such media have been ascendantsince the early days of photography and cinema, the digital rev-olution wrought by the web has greatly accelerated our immer-sion in a visual world. The online photo-sharing site Flickrrecently reported that it hosts more than 6 billion images, whilethe video site YouTube claims that an average of 48 hours ofvideo is uploaded there each minute. These popular sites arejoined online by many other institutional websites and archives,including those hosted by museums and universities. The USCShoah Foundation Institute houses important content that com-




timony clips. This also means we can ask newtypes of research questions and reach new au-diences. We might imagine the scholar’s role asproviding a kind of guided tour of a selectionfrom the Visual History Archive, using analyti-cal skills and historical knowledge.

The beauty of working online within an aca-demic context is also that several scholars mightwork together on a particular theme or set of tes-timonies, providing different interpretations. Italso means that research is not static; other com-munities of users, such as students, archivists,or interested members of the public, might pro-vide comments or add new clips from the testi-monies. This, in turn, creates new forms ofedited online publication and new pathsthrough the Visual History Archive.

The important scholarly research being un-dertaken at the Institute can now live in closerrelation to the testimonies themselves, whichare the heart of the Visual History Archive. Onecan imagine a future in which users might notonly watch the testimonies but also view the re-search undertaken by scholars, which could beaccessible from within the collection. It meansthat if a scholar has studied a group of testi-monies about, say, hunger in the ghetto, when-ever one of those testimonies is watched, theVisual History Archive will be able to tell the

viewer that there is interesting research con-nected to it. That way, archive and analysiswould live together within the digital realm,each enriching the other.

Or consider the scholar who wants to demon-strate the power of emotion or facial expressionon the spoken word and illustrate meaning in thetestimonies that exceeds text. Such a scholar willbe able to use the testimony directly and includethe nuances of the visual directly into her own re-search online. This will allow her reader to en-

gage the face and voice of the survivor throughthe video while reading the research analysis. Theflick of an eye, the sweep of a hand, the timbre ofa voice would bring the writing to life.

Projects such as this point toward new possi-bilities for visual scholarship, making rich useof the visual nature of the Institute’s vital collec-tion. It will hold scholarly analysis and the evi-dence the testimonies provide much moreclosely together. It will also embrace the humanelements of testimony, underscoring that theentire person remembers history and illustrat-ing the power of video to capture that reality.

Visual archives, including the Institute’s Vi-sual History Archive, are eager for scholars toengage the testimonies as audio-visual material,but still very little support exists for scholars toundertake such research. In close partnershipwith the Institute and with support from the An-drew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alliance forNetworking Visual Culture (ANVC) is workingwith archives, universities, and publishers to ad-dress this challenge. The Alliance aims to enablescholars to work more closely with archival ma-terials, creating new forms of analysis. The re-sult is an easy-to-use new software platformcalled Scalar, which is being developed partly atthe University of Southern California. Scalar al-lows scholars to publish online with leading uni-

versity presses and to incorporate video clipsfrom the Institute’s Visual History Archive inthis research. Our goal is to enable scholarshipthat actively engages the testimonies in all theirrichness and to share this work with new audi-ences online; our publication partners includeMIT, Duke University, and the University of Cal-ifornia, which are all committed to publishingresearch that engages the Visual HistoryArchive in new ways.

The Alliance is currently in a prototypingphase, working with a select group of institu-tions to test out its ideas and to develop appro-priate infrastructure. In addition to theInstitute’s Visual History Archive, the Alliance’sarchival partners include a video database of per-formance art addressing cultural memory (theHemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library),

the non-profit Internet Archive, and the USC-based research and teaching archive, CriticalCommons. Each of these archives is quite dif-ferent but, across their differences, we are learn-ing a great deal about how scholars might bestuse still and moving images within new formsof scholarly writing.

We are finding that researchers are excited toengage archival materials in digital form, andthose scholars committed to analyzing video orstill images see particular advantages to beingable to work “close up” with these materials, al-lowing annotation and detailed interpretation.They see distinct gains to be had from being ableto “pull” these materials directly into new author-ing platforms, especially when they can drawmaterial from multiple sources. Nonetheless, re-searchers are also concerned about how thiswork with archival materials will circulate andhow it will count within their universities whenthey are evaluated for promotion and tenure.Humanities scholars today typically work withuniversity presses when publishing their re-search in print form, so these same institutionsare important partners in our current research.

Several tensions exist within the academiccommunity over digital scholarship. Presseswant to undertake this work but are operating onvery limited budgets, which makes experimen-tation difficult. Scholars value the ability to usedigital media in their research but often needsupport in order to author in new digital plat-forms. Archives want to provide such supportbut also want to work in tandem with otherarchives and other institutions so that eacharchive need not reinvent the wheel. Universityadministrators worry about how best to evaluateemerging forms of online research that are oftendeeply collaborative and that also circulate to newaudiences outside the academy. Over time, wehave developed careful guidelines for assessingmore traditional forms of research, and digitalscholarship can sometimes challenge thesemethods. Rather than working in a piecemealfashion, the Alliance for Networking Visual Cul-ture aims to address these many tensions as partof the same process, building both a rich tech-nological and a human infrastructure for newmodes of communication.

Working with the tools of the digital era is ex-citing, but the digital is for us a means to an end,not an end in and of itself. Our larger goal is todeploy the digital in ways that let us bring his-tory and memory more palpably to life. Throughthese research projects, we aim to animate theVisual History Archive, allowing important sto-ries to be told using the media that move us: thetestimony itself.

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of

Gender and Critical Studies at the USC School

of Cinematic Arts, and Co-Director of the

USC Center for Transformative Scholarship.

For a full biography, see page 4.

One can imagine a future in which users might not only watch the testimonies but also view the research undertaken by scholars, which could be accessible from within the collection.



Memorialization and technology

EVERY MUSEUM is challenged to find meaningfulways to share its content. But what about when thatcontent is memory itself—namely, the memoriesof nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and otherwitnesses contained in their video interviews?

“It would take years to watch them one at a time,” E. Randol Schoenbergsaid. Schoenberg is Chairman of the Board of the Los Angeles Museum of theHolocaust, which has unveiled its approach to the issue of how to engage peoplewith 105,000 hours of video from the Visual History Archive: the Tree of Testimony, a stunning exhibit of dozens of video screens that immerses visitors

Building a Tree of Testimony

By Mark RothmanA new exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of the

holocaust immerses visitors in survivors’ memoriesfrom the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

in the life stories preserved by the USC ShoahFoundation Institute.

“On these screens, we can display all of thetestimonies in one space over one year,”Schoenberg said. “Every family that con-tributed to the Visual History Archive shouldtake comfort knowing that their loved one’s tes-timony will be seen and heard by our visitors.”

The Tree of Testimony demonstrates howtechnology is enhancing Holocaust educationand memorialization. Sixty-five screens, seem-ingly placed at random across a large wall, areconnected via wires that suggest the branchesof a “tree of life,” or family tree. Keywords,culled from the Institute’s extensive catalogu-ing of the testimonies, appear onscreen totease information from whichever testimony iscurrently playing; when someone selects thattestimony, the keywords disappear so the sur-vivors can speak for themselves. Visitors canthen listen to any onscreen testimony throughour award-winning, iPod touch-based audio-guidance system.

By also making the Visual History Archiveaccessible at computer stations found at vari-ous locations throughout the Museum, it hasbecome a destination for testimony-based re-search. Each workstation employ the Institute’sown search engine, which draws from a the-saurus of more than 50,000 search terms—such as individuals’ names, geographiclocations, and historic events—to locate seg-ments of testimony that address specific topicsor interests.

“There’s something poetic about the oldestHolocaust museum in the United States rely-ing on technology to exhibit the testimonies ina new way,” Stephen D. Smith, Executive Di-rector of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute,said. “But the Tree of Testimony is abouthuman lives, and the Museum is exercising theutmost care to ensure that the technology is astransparent as possible. In that way, tens ofthousands of visitors each year will rememberthe survivors who guided them into the past,rather than the systems used to draw peopleinto their memories.”

Mark Rothman is Executive Director of the

Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. For a

full biography, see page 4.

On these screens, we can display all of the testimonies in one spaceover one year. Every family that con-tributed to the Visual History Archiveshould take comfort knowing thattheir loved one’s testimony will beseen and heard by our visitors.

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The Tree of Testimony at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust



Closing

Stephen D. Smith interviews Comcast Chairman & CEO

Brian L.Roberts

DigitalDivıde

the

Stephen D. Smith: People might not think of education when theythink of Comcast, but that’s what brought our organizations to-gether. How does Comcast approach educational outreach?

Brian L. Roberts: When my father started Comcast in 1963, hefelt that our philanthropy should focus on the communitieswhere our cable systems are. This idea is at the essence of ourthinking; it guides our educational work. Education is a naturalpriority at Comcast, particularly for low-income children whoaren’t getting the best of what education can be, whether that’stechnology, teacher training, or youth initiatives. A number of ourmost successful partnerships have been in these areas.

Smith: How would you say technology is shaping education?

Roberts: Technology is involved in so much of how we live ourdaily lives, and it’s changing at light speed. The problem with

technology and connectivity is that there are Haves and Have-Nots, which is why Comcast is rolling out what is probably themost important and ambitious program in our company’s his-tory: Internet Essentials. The goal is for every K-12 student who’seligible for the National School Lunch Program—which is basedon family income—to receive a super-discounted laptop, digitalliteracy training, and $9.95-a-month broadband service until theygraduate from high school. If you think about what’s necessaryto do homework, to stay connected to what’s going on in class, towhat’s on the smart board…if you think about what it takes to pre-pare for college or the work force, it all requires being able to workon the Internet. If you’re not connected, you don’t have any hope.This is the so-called “digital divide,” and it’s a challenge that toomany students and families face. That’s why Comcast is partner-ing with community-based organizations, and with organizations

PastForward special feature

photographed by paul sirochman


“If you think about what it takes to prepare for college or the work force, it all requires being able to work on the Internet. If you’re not connected, you don’t

have any hope. This is the so-called “digital divide,” and it’s a challenge that too many students and families face.” – Brian L. Roberts



like the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, to cre-ate connections that otherwise would not exist.

Smith: How did you hear about the Institute?

Roberts: Like many people, I saw the Shoah Foun-dation’s documentary films years ago. And as amoviegoer and a member of the media industry,I’ve been a huge admirer of Steven Spielberg andhis vision for changing the world by trying tomake more than an incremental contribution…by trying to have a revolutionary effect.

Smith: When you say “revolutionary,” what doyou mean?

Roberts: Take Steven’s films, for example.Through projects like Schindler’s List and TheColor Purple, he’s dealt with subjects that mayheretofore have only occupied a niche in publicawareness, yet he’s managed to attract large au-diences. The same thing is happening with theUSC Shoah Foundation Institute. It’s drawingworldwide attention to the life stories of Holo-caust survivors.

Smith: You’ve talked about people in your lifewho’ve had an impact on you. How does that re-late to your work?

Roberts: When you’re part of a company, veryrarely do you get a chance to step back and re-flect. You have to produce, and your quarterly re-sults have to be better than the last quarter, everyquarter. Nonetheless, it’s important to ask,“Where do we want to be in five or 10 years, notonly from an investor’s viewpoint but as a com-pany that everyone would be proud to be asso-ciated with?” I think what would make my dadproud, and what would have made Dan Aaronproud, who helped start the company—he’spassed away—could we be using our technologyand relationships to help in a way that no othercompany can help?

Smith: Can you give me an example?

Roberts: Right out of the box was the [Ambas-sadors for Humanity] event in Philadelphia. Wesaid, “Let’s use that as a galvanizing opportunityto think more creatively and ask the Institute,‘What are your goals?’ ” One issue was that 10

films had been made, but not too many peoplehad really had the chance to see them. So ourthinking was, “We have the On Demand plat-form, we have our XFINITY TV app for theiPad, and we’re looking for extraordinary, break-through content. Let’s put these 10 films on TVvia our On Demand and make them availableonline.” And within a very short time, the Insti-tute’s films—and the stories and memories theycontain—were accessed 350,000 times by indi-viduals and families who otherwise would nothave seen them.

Another example has to do with our commit-ment to getting broadband into the homes ofmore low-income families. The idea of con-necting them to Holocaust survivors—of say-ing, “One of the reasons to go on the Internetis to learn from the stories of people who havecome before you”—wouldn’t seem like an ob-vious fit. So we were all pleasantly surprised byhow kids responded, by their increased desireto get onto 21st century technology by lookingback at some of the horrors of the 20th century.

“Thequestion is, ‘What can we do to improve education so the nextI think we’re one tiny part of that conversation, but we should do our best

geto



So through our Internet Essentials program,and through our partnerships with One Econ-omy, Project H.O.M.E. in Philadelphia, andwith the USC Shoah Foundation Institute,we’re finding that there’s an unlimited reser-voir of ideas. Now, we just have to get out andmake the best ones happen.

Smith: What do you think about the role of mediacompanies in the world, in terms of responsibilityand the shaping of ethics and values?

Roberts: When I had a chance to visit with [USC]President Nikias, I asked him why the universitywanted to take on the obligation and opportu-nity to house the Institute’s Visual HistoryArchive on its campus.

Smith: What did he say?

Roberts: He lit up. He said the Institute can helpdefine USC for more than just what’s happen-ing on campus, and I think the same is true ofa company like Comcast. My thinking is, “Okay,we just inherited NBC News as part of our ac-quisition of NBCUniversal. More people gettheir news from NBC than any other source in

America, which means it needs to be the best.”We also have a platform to connect people allover the world by using our broadband service.There’s this pursuit of global connectedness,while at the same time we want to preserve free-dom and individuality… These are lofty ideascompared to what was happening 50 years ago,when you were very much in your own silo, bothtechnically and educationally.

Smith: Have you had any moving personal expe-riences with Holocaust survivors or through theirtestimonies?

Roberts: Well, one experience that’s very per-sonal was with Dan Aaron. Dan was the head ofComcast Cable. His family escaped the Holo-caust, but both of his parents committed suicideonce they got to the United States. Dan was myfirst real boss; he had the greatest heart and so-cial conscience, and he cared deeply about Com-cast’s employees. He was a really deep thinkerand a special man.

Unfortunately, Dan got Parkinson’s diseasewhen he was young, and he passed away 20

years later. But toward the end of his life, he andhis brother wrote a memoir that told a lot ofDan’s history that many of us didn’t know.There were some secrets in there about howtough his job was, and about how he lost his par-ents, that really struck a chord with me.

Smith: What do you mean when you talk aboutDan’s “social conscience”?

Roberts: It means looking at a decision with aneye for all its implications, not just the bottomline. It’s about asking, “What is the culture ofthe company? Is it fair?” Not turning a deaf earto different points of view is probably what Danstressed the most, but it was also kindness. Letme give you an example.

When I was about 23 years old, I had to arguea matter before a city council. I got about half ofwhat I asked for, and I thought I’d failed. WhenI got back, I received a handwritten note fromDan that said, “You did a great job. You werelucky to have gotten us what we got.” It gave mesuch a good feeling. To this day, I still don’t knowwhether I did a good job or not, but it doesn’t re-ally matter. Dan made me feel like I had.

Smith: In your career or in your life so far, whatare you most proud of, and what do you still wantto accomplish?

Roberts: I’m very proud of my family and my re-lationship with my wife, Aileen; I’m proud of ourkids and what they’re accomplishing. Profes-sionally, perhaps I’m most proud of what Com-cast has become. We have wonderful people whoare giving back to the communities we do busi-ness in, people who are using the technologicalrevolution to add value to society at all levels.

But the world never stops. The question is,“What can we do to improve education so thenext generation has a better chance of success?”I think we’re one tiny part of that conversation,but we should do our best to participate—tohelp as best we can. Now with NBCUniversal, Ihope we can do even more to help in the next20 years than we did in the last 50.

extest

generation has a better chance of success?’ to participate—to help as best we can.”


Beyond cameras Daisy Miller, a Holocaust survivor and the Institute’s Director of Community Relations, in one of the light stages that will capture testimony. Photo by Kim Fox



How new technologies—and interview questions—will contribute to the dialogue between

students and survivors.

By Heather Maio, David Traum, and Paul Debevec

DimensionsTestimonyin

New

H

Testimony in the future

OLOCAUST SURVIVOR Gussie Zaks had come to San Diego tospeak to a class about her experiences during the Holocaust aspart of the students’ world history course. The room was silentas she spoke. Only Holocaust survivors seem to have the ability

to keep a class as captivated. For more than 60 years, Holocaust survivors haverecounted their stories thousands of times to thousands of children all over theworld, giving insights and without a doubt changing the perspective of thosechildren for the rest of their lives.

Gussie recounted how every single member of her immediate family had beenmurdered; she told the students how she had managed to survive and hold on;then she answered their questions, and a dialogue between generations unfolded.

After the class was over and the little crowd around her had subsided, Gussieturned to leave. A girl stepped between her and the door and tried to speak, butshe could only cry. Gussie initially apologized, assuming that something she hadsaid had upset the girl. Finally, the girl revealed that her sister had drowned inthe family’s swimming pool several years before. She wanted to hear from Gussie



relationship between survivors and students,Conscience Display and the USC Institute forCreative Technologies (ICT) have undertaken aproject called New Dimensions in Testimony.

New Dimensions in Testimony will combinenew interview content with advanced filming,voice-recognition processing, and display tech-nologies, developed specifically for such a need.It is our intent to design an environment inwhich an individual or an entire class can havea survivor sit with them to tell his or her story,via video or projector; they will be able to askquestions, and the survivor will answer fromthe testimony as if he or she were in the room.

To do this, New Dimensions in Testimonywill gather survivors’ answers to hundreds ofquestions—some that they are asked on a dailybasis, and some that they may never have been

how she had found the strength to go on afterlosing her own sister. Gussie told her that it wasimportant to remember her sister, but that shemust not feel guilty about moving on.

A relationship developed in that classroom,as it has in other classrooms and museumsaround the world where Holocaust survivorshave been tireless volunteers for many years.First there was the testimony, then the dialoguewith the class, then the personal conversation.

Countless children have been touched byHolocaust survivors who have visited theirschool or talked to them in a museum. Theseencounters have created a connection and giventhose students an intimate experience withsomeone uniquely qualified to reflect on life,and about a very real part of history from aneyewitness perspective. To preserve that special

How Natural Language Technology WorksBy David Traum

One critical element of the new project is developing the ability to understand questionsput to a survivor and select appropriate responses. This will allow a person to engage in aninteractive dialogue with the survivor, asking questions in their own words and hearing thesurvivor’s response. The technology must be able to recognize similarities between wordpatterns in questions and answers and choose answers to new questions that are similar,but not the same as, questions for which the answers are known. The Institute for CreativeTechnologies (ICT) has developed a number of virtual human characters with this capability,for a variety of purposes; for example, they are used for training clinical psychologists andsoldiers to conduct different kinds of interviews or recognize when someone might be lying.

To achieve the level of authenticity neces-sary to provide viewers with a truly immer-sive experience, we will apply thetechnology to the answers Holocaust sur-vivors give us, so that young people inter-acting with them will have their questionsanswered.

ICT Graphics Lab Research ProgrammerAndrew Jones (left) discusses the technologies being used to make the New Dimensions in Testimony project possible. Photo by Kim Fox

New insights Survivors like Pinchas Gutter (seated) will answer new



swer new interview questions—many of which may have never been asked of them before. Photo by Michele Zousmer


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the U.K. Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire.After his talk, a 14-year-old boy approached himand said, “Mr. Hersh, I had an argument withmy mother and fell out with her this past Sun-

day. I have refused to talk to her since. Afterhearing your story of how you lost your wholefamily, I realize how important family is. Ipromise you that I’ll never take my family forgranted again.”

Years from now, long after the last survivorhas left us, the New Dimensions in Testimonyproject will provide one path to enable youngpeople to listen to a survivor and ask their ownquestions directly, encouraging them, each intheir own way, to reflect on the deep and mean-ingful consequences of the Holocaust.

“It is amazing to think that, as well as theUSC Shoah Foundation Institute that pre-serves our testimonies in perpetuity, youngpeople will be able to hold the kind of conver-sation I have daily when I go out to speak,” saidHolocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter. “This is atruly good use for technology.”

For full biographies of the authors, see page 2.

To learn more, visit:http://gl.ict.usc.edu/LightStages/ http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/DigitalEmilyhttp://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3-DTeleconferencing/http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3-DDisplay

asked before—on topics such as family, tradi-tion, memory, belief, identity, ethics, etc. The an-swers they give will be placed in a database; thisdatabase will then be used to sustain the dia-logue between students and the survivor. Wewill use a technology called Natural LanguageUnderstanding, which will allow the computerto find the most appropriate answer from themany answers available. The most advanced 3-D recording techniques will mean we can recordand present photo-real human images and dis-play them life-size, in real three dimensions.

The project is about collecting the penetrat-ing answers survivors give to the difficult ques-tions young people ask. The technology wehave chosen to develop and use allows us tocapture that conversation with the closest senseof reality at hand. As one result, ConscienceDisplay and ICT envision a room in a museumin which you can sit and ask questions of aHolocaust survivor for generations to come.

One survivor, Arek Hersh, was speaking at

Recording and Displaying Testimony in 3-DBy Paul Debevec

ICT has pioneered techniques for 3-D display, allowing a speaker’s face to be recorded, trans-mitted, displayed to an entire group of people—no 3-D glasses required—and able to makerealistic eye contact with the remote audience for compelling telepresence. For this project,ICT will extend these technologies to record the Holocaust survivors, from head-to-toe, whilethey give testimony. Later, these data will be processed into video segments that can be

played back verbatim, precisely as theywere delivered by the survivors. The play-back system, which is still in development,allows the testimony to be seen from anyvantage point, as if it were given in a class-room or museum setting, illuminatedproperly to blend with the environment.

Light Stage technology will be used to record Holocaust survivors, allowing them to be seen from any vantage point, in 3-D.


From left: Heather Maio,Director, Conscience

Display; Paul Debevec,Associate Director for

Graphics Research, USCInstitute for Creative

Technologies (ICT); Daisy Miller, Holocaust

survivor and Director of Development and

Community Relations,USC Shoah Foundation

Institute; and DavidTraum, Research Scien-tist, Research Assistant

Professor, ICT


pastforward Summer 2012 27PH

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The Genocide in rwanda

RWANDAN SINGER and genocide survivor KizitoMihigo has a lyric that expresses how the geno-cide changed my view on the value of humanlife: “The darkness has shown my way.”

I lost my parents and four sisters during thedarkness of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsiin Rwanda. I was one of many orphans left with-out assistance after 100 days of killing. Ratherthan let the darkness consume me, I have triedto learn from what I experienced. I’ve also joinedthe effort to establish the Genocide Archive ofRwanda, a repository of audio-visual testimony.

Survivors’ stories are important for many rea-sons. Their educational use will teach youngRwandans about the mistakes of the past: There’sa Rwandan proverb that says, “If you see a stone,it cannot damage your hoe,” which means thatonce you become aware of dangers, such as theprejudices and policies that led to genocide in1994, you will be able to avoid them in the future.

Testimony can help restore social cohesion.For centuries, Rwanda was home to three socioe-

conomic groups that lived alongside one another in general harmony; the ten-sions that erupted in 1994 originated under a Belgian colonial administrationthat actively sought to enhance the perception of differences between Hutuand Tutsi. Testimonies challenge this distortion by revealing all that we havein common as human beings.

Another reason for testimony is to remind the global community of its re-sponsibility to defend human rights; a survivor’s voice is a powerful tool forthe advocacy of genocide prevention and intervention.

Giving testimony looks easier than it actually is. I remember the first timeI tried to give mine, eight years after the genocide, at an international confer-ence. As the conference drew to a close, I realized that people expected me to

For Rwanda, fortheWorld

By Freddy MutanguhaSharing my story was a way out of darkness.

Through the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, it’s

also how I’ll be able to make a difference.

talk about my experiences. I felt obligated to doso, even though I was unprepared and unwill-ing, so I shared a “light version” of what hadreally happened to me. Afterward, I wonderedif I had done the right thing.

In 2004, I began interviewing other Rwan-dan survivors for Aegis Trust, which managesthe Kigali Genocide Memorial. As the survivorsrecalled what they had lived through, I foundmyself relating to their pain; this connectionhad a healing effect that helped prepare me toshare my own story.

Revisiting those memories for the first timecan make you feel sick. It can give you headachesand nightmares. But the more you tell your story,the easier it gets, which is why I was able to givefive hours of testimony at the USC Shoah Foun-dation Institute in 2008. Aegis Trust and the Ki-gali Genocide Memorial had begun planning theGenocide Archive of Rwanda, and the need foroutside training and consultation had becomeapparent; meanwhile, the Institute wanted to in-clude Rwandan testimonies in its Visual HistoryArchive. Aegis Trust proposed a partnership be-tween the Kigali Genocide Memorial and the In-stitute, which would lead to a unified repository;I was on the delegation that came to Los Angelesto formalize an agreement between the two or-ganizations. In the years since, we have studiedthe Institute’s interview methodology and mod-ified it for use with Rwandan survivors. We havelearned how to make our archive searchable likethe Institute’s archive; we have even spent timewith the technologists who manage the Insti-tute’s digital preservation system.

At the Kigali Genocide Memorial, we sharethe Institute’s belief that the testimonies ofgenocide survivors will change the world. AsCanadian First Nations writer Thomas Kingwrote in his book The Truth About Stories, onceyou’ve heard a story, it becomes your story: “Dowith it as you will. …But don’t say in the yearsto come that you would have lived your life dif-ferently if only you had heard this story. You’veheard it now.”

Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/witnessesforhumanity/rwandangenocide to learn more about the effort topreserve Rwandan survivors’ memories.

Freddy Mutanguha is Director of the Kigali

Genocide Memorial and a survivor of genocide.

For a full biography, see page 4.

As Thomas King wrote in his bookThe Truth About Stories, once you’veheard a story, it becomes your story:“Do with it as you will. …But don’tsay in the years to come that youwould have lived your life differentlyif only you had heard this story.You’ve heard it now.”


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searching the Archive

THE INSTITUTE’S testimonies have been indexedminute-by-minute by cataloguers, who developeda thesaurus of more than 50,000 words and con-cepts, individuals’ names, and locations. Theseare the keywords used by the Visual History

Archive’s search engine; the indexing system is what allows a student or scholarinterested in female political prisoners’ first impressions of camps, for instance,to locate the 42 testimonies—and the specific segments—in which women whowere political prisoners during the war recall their arrival in camps.

As useful as the archive is, its searchability is based on a limited set of key-words; if a word is not indexed, the search engine will not be able to locate tes-timony in which it occurs. Searchability is also limited by language; testimoniesin non-English languages are “hidden” from people who speak only English,and vice versa. To solve these shortcomings, our team is using the Institute’sCzech-language testimonies to embark on two projects that go beyond the usualresearch paradigm of improving speech and language technology incrementally.

The first project aims to make the testimonies fully searchable, rather thanlimiting search terminology to the prescribed keywords. To do this, we are de-veloping software that converts speech into text. This speech-recognition en-gine, which has been in development at the Department of Cybernetics,

Searching TheirVoices

By Jan Hajič, Pavel Ircing, and Josef PsutkaTo facilitate testimony-based research, our team

has gone beyond the usual paradigm of improving

speech and language technology incrementally.

For full biographies of Jan Hajič, Pavel Ircing,

Josef Psutka, and other contributors to this issue

of PastForward, see page 2.

University of West Bohemia, for more than adecade, has the ability to learn; after being pre-sented with thousands of recorded vocal utter-ances and corresponding text transcriptions,the system develops a statistical framework forassessing the likelihood that a specific unit ofsound relates to a specific unit of text. Usingthis probability-based acoustic model, thespeech-recognition engine can analyze speechas vocalized text. If the Institute’s Visual His-tory Archive had this capability, users would beable to explore the richness of the survivors’narratives by searching the entire “text” of thetestimonies as if they were transcribed.

If we were to allow the speech-recognition en-gine to develop an acoustic model based on ar-bitrarily formed sequences of sounds, real wordswould seldom result. Thus, the software hasbeen designed so that it is only able to form se-quences of sounds found in its lexicon, or built-in vocabulary of words; these words, as well asthe language modeling capability that allows thesystem to recognize correct sequences of words,are derived from language corpora: very largesamples of “real-world” text that researchers useto identify—and in our case, adhere to—therules that govern natural languages.

One of the greatest challenges we’ve facedhas been the difficulty of finding language cor-pora that are large enough to be used as asource for deriving reliable probability esti-mates. At the same time, in order to make thespeech-recognition engine useful for searchingthe Visual History Archive, we should use texton topics similar to those covered in the testi-monies; for while the system can recognizeeven “difficult” speech (such as that of some-one overcome by emotion) with 75 to 80 per-cent accuracy, it can only recognize words thatare included in its lexicon.

When it comes to searching the testimonies,experience has shown that rare words are theones people find most interesting; for example,someone may want to search for testimonyfrom survivors who lived in the same village asdid their parents or grandparents—a villagewhose name has been pronounced and spelledin different ways and that is now called some-thing entirely different from what it was calledbefore the war. But what if the user doesn’tknow how the system’s lexicon refers to that vil-lage? As a solution to the challenge this questionraises, we have developed software that analyzestestimony for networks of words and phonemes(distinct units of sound from which words areformed) without restricting results to vocabularyfound in the system’s lexicon. If a user searchesfor a term that is found in the lexicon, it is




preserving the Testimonies

Preservation Bit by Bit

By Sam GustmanThe goal of our digital preservation program

is to ensure that the testimonies will still be available

100 years from now.

IN LIBRARIES and archives, it has always beendifficult to measure how much damage is occur-ring within a collection; if a page in a book getsripped, it may be a long time before anyone no-tices. The same thing can happen to computerfiles that are stored offline on tapes, hard disks,or optical disks. But with online storage, it’s pos-sible to track damage automatically.

At the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, weconstantly monitor multiple online copies of theVisual History Archive, which is now fourpetabytes in size (that’s 32 quadrillion bits of in-formation). We currently have two digital copiesof the archive at USC, and we’re adding a third,which for safety purposes will then also be mir-rored to a “cloud” storage provider that will man-age a fourth copy of the archive outside California.The goal of our digital preservation program is toensure that the testimonies of Holocaust sur-

vivors and other witnesses will still be available 100 years from now. Everything deteriorates over time, and film is no exception. Conservative es-

timates give shelf lives of 50 years for film, 20 years for videotape, five years forhard drives, three years for data tape, and only two years for DVDs before age-related “data rot” causes visible damage; the newer the technology, the morequickly data rot sets in. The four online copies of the Visual History Archive,both at USC and far away from USC, are constantly monitored for this rot. Whenit occurs, the files are immediately corrected, keeping the original copy pristine.

Because the testimonies were originally recorded on videotape, we can expectto see visible errors 20 years after they were recorded; that’s in 2014 for the tes-timonies recorded in 1994. But even if the original videotapes are unusable100 years from now, because of the technology we are using, we can guaranteethat in 2112 the testimonies will be available and in pristine condition, as longas they are kept on an active online system and monitored for errors.

Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/preservation to learn more about the preservation program.

Sam Gustman is the USC Shoah Foundation

Institute’s Chief Technology Officer, responsible

for the operations and preservation of the Visual

History Archive. For a full biography, see page 2.

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quickly located in the word network, which isvery reliable; if the term is not found in the lex-icon, it is deconstructed into phonemes andsearched for in the phoneme network as a wayto find words that the system doesn’t recognize.In both cases, the user is presented with a list ofterms that link directly to corresponding seg-ments of testimony.

Our second project addresses the issue of ma-chine translation, or using software to translatebetween English and other languages. There aretwo ways in which a good translation system canbe useful: for translating keywords from one lan-guage to another and for searching across lan-guages. Keywords that refer to general terms,such as “family” or “hunger,” are easily trans-lated; those referring to historical names (e.g.,place names with variable spelling and pronun-ciation) are much harder to translate. We havetried to develop a general approach to translationthat allows us to identify terms that must bemanually translated (geographic names, namesof organizations, etc.), distinguishing them fromwords and phrases that current software typicallyhas no difficulty translating. Such a system couldbe used to translate the Visual History Archive’sEnglish-language keywords into the many otherlanguages in which survivors gave testimony;this alone would enable people to use keywordsin their native language to search for relevant tes-timony in other languages. However, in casesthat would require a full-text search of a sur-vivors’ narrative, users would be helpless, whichis why we are developing a full-text translationsystem—one robust enough to handle automatictranscripts with reasonable accuracy. So far, wehave concentrated on translating between Eng-lish and Czech, since we are most readily able toaddress this pairing; additional quantities of lin-guistic data will be needed to broaden the projectto include other languages.

Speech search (word- and phonetic-based)and machine translation are technologies thatcan be applied separately or together. We imag-ine that archives similar to the USC ShoahFoundation Institute’s (for example, videoarchives of broadcasts, recordings of speechesand lectures, or even audio blogs and “vlogs”)can benefit from such technology, which allowssearching for relevant content even if no key-word index or other laboriously prepared,search-enabling data are available—and in auser’s mother tongue, regardless of the lan-guage of the recording.

The research described herein is supported by theMinistry of Culture of the Czech Republic as theproject ‘AMALACH,’ grant No. DF12P01OVV022.



Intersections Dr. Kori Street (top left), the Institute’s new Director of Programs; students with filmmakerMichael Apted (top right) at the Student Voices master class sponsored by HBO; representatives of the princi-pal institutions holding audio-visual Holocaust testimonies convene at the Institute (right, second from top);staff members of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre (bottom) discuss their experiences at the Institute.

Institute NewsInstitute Welcomes NewDirector of Programs The Institute is pleased to announce the appoint-ment of Dr. Kori Street as Director of Programs.

Known for her work in Holocaust education,testimony-based learning, and information lit-eracy, Street will drive the Institute’s educationagenda in the U.S. and around the world. Herresearch interests include the Holocaust, thescholarship of teaching and learning, and WorldWar I, and her publications have focused on in-formation literacy, Holocaust imagery in film,and women in World War I.

Street has received a number of awards, in-cluding the Pierre Berton Award for History(2009) and the Distinguished Faculty Award(2011) of Mount Royal University, where sheserved as Chair of Entrepreneurship, NonprofitStudies, International Business and Aviationin the Bissett School of Business before com-ing to the Institute.

Preservation & AccessAudio-visual Holocaust Testimonies PartnershipThe Conference on Material Claims AgainstGermany (Claims Conference) convened ameeting of the principal institutions holdingaudio-visual Holocaust testimonies at the USCShoah Foundation Institute last June. In addi-tion to sharing information about how hold-ings are being stored, retrieved, catalogued,and indexed, the institutions met to discussstrategies for preservation and access to audio-visual collections.

Participating institutions included the For-tunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testi-monies, Yale University Library; Mémorial dela Shoah; Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Liv-ing Memorial to the Holocaust; the UnitedStates Holocaust Memorial Museum; USCShoah Foundation Institute; and Yad Vashem– The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Re-membrance Authority.



Summer 2012

News&Events

access to the testimoniesThe Visual History Archive is now avail-able to the public at 38 sites worldwide,including the first sites in Canada,Greece, and the United Kingdom.

The following institutions recently gainedaccess to the Visual History Archive:

• Aristotle University of Thessaloniki*(Thessaloniki, Greece)

• History Meeting House**(Warsaw, Poland)

• Leibniz Universität Hannover*(Hannover, Germany)

• McMaster University(Ontario, Canada)

• Northwestern University(Evanston, Illinois)

• Royal Holloway, University of London(London, England)

• University of Athens*(Athens, Greece)

• University of Haifa(Haifa, Israel)

• University of Massachusetts, Amherst(Amherst, Massachusetts)

• University of Pennsylvania(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

*Access made possible with the help of Freie Universität Berlin

**Access made possible with the help of Charles University

Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/locatorto find the access site nearest you.

Scholarship & ResearchDocumenting theRwandan Tutsi GenocideA team from the Kigali Genocide MemorialCentre recently participated in an eight-weekprogram at the Institute intended to build ca-pacity for testimony collection in Rwanda. Inaddition to training and working with col-leagues at the Institute, the team led a paneldiscussion at the University of Southern Cali-fornia on the challenges survivors face today,the effort to bring justice and reconciliation,and the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre’sdocumentation- and education-related goals.

Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/witnessesforhuman-ity/rwandangenocide to learn more about the In-stitute’s work in Rwanda.

Young Filmmakers Make Their “Voices” HeardThe Institute’s second annual Student VoicesFilm Contest gave USC students of all levelsand disciplines the opportunity to submit shortfilms that use testimony to address topics re-lated to the Holocaust and genocide, memory,and human rights.

Kayla Carlisle and Will Merrick won the con-test for their film, Strange Inheritance. Thisyear’s distinguished jury again includedBranko Lustig, Academy Award-winning pro-ducer (Gladiator, Schindler’s List) and Holocaustsurvivor; Michael Renov, Professor of CriticalStudies and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs,USC School of Cinematic Arts; and HollyWillis, Research Assistant Professor and Direc-tor of Academic Programs, Institute for Multi-media Literacy, USC School of Cinematic Arts.

HBO sponsored a two-day master class toprepare students for the contest; the class of-fered training on ethical editing of survivor tes-timony, as well as on filmmaking techniques.Michael Apted, director of the Up series of doc-umentaries, delivered the keynote address.

Visit dornsife.usc/edu/vhi/masterclass2012 tosee photos from the HBO master class. Visit dorn-sife.usc.edu/vhi/studentvoices to watch select filmsfrom the contest.

Italy’s National ArchivesLaunches Web PortalA new Web portal has given researchers inItaly access to more than 430 Italian-languagetestimonies from the Visual History Archive.

The launch of the research portal is the latestmilestone of the Institute’s long-standing rela-tionship with Italy’s Archivio Centrale delloStato (Central State Archives) and Ministry ofCultural Assets and Affairs, and was done incooperation with the Scuola Normale Superi-ore di Pisa. Work began a decade ago, whenfunding from the Ministry of Cultural Assetsand Affairs enabled the Central State Archivesto send a team of historians and archivists toLos Angeles to index the Institute’s Italian-lan-guage testimonies.

The Central State Archives hosted a gather-ing in Rome to celebrate the launch of the re-search portal in September. Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/archivio2012 to view photos, video, andmore information about the event.

Math Undergrads Study Visual History Archive’s Geographic DataFor the second consecutive year, the Institutewas a sponsor organization in the UCLA *Insti-tute for Pure & Applied Mathematics’ Researchin Industrial Projects (RIPS) Program (see page12 for an article by 2010 program participantMichael Hintze). The RIPS program “providesan opportunity for high-achieving undergradu-ate students to work…on a real-world researchproject proposed by a sponsor from industry orthe public sector.” A team of students from Mex-ico, Russia, and the United States studied theVisual History Archive to find ways to make bet-ter use of the geographic data contained in thetestimonies; visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/rips2012for photos and more information.

Other industry participants in the 2011 RIPSprogram included Aerospace Corporation, AretéAssociates, Disney/Pixar, HRL Laboratories,IBM, the Los Angeles Police Department, Stan-dard & Poor’s, and Symantec Corporation.*The Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics is a NationalScience Foundation Mathematical Sciences Institute.



Survivors’ Memories Enhance Academic CoursesThe Institute’s testimonies of Holocaust sur-vivors and other witnesses have enhanced 275academic courses at universities and collegesacross the world.

Courses range from film studies to “Effectsof Traumatic Experiences,” co-taught by BethMeyerowitz, Vice Provost, Professor of Psy-chology and Preventive Medicine, USC (farleft); and Karen Jungblut, the Institute’s Direc-tor of Research and Documentation (right).

Testimony has been integrated into morethan 70 courses at USC alone. Here Dr. DanLeshem, the Institute’s Associate Director ofAcademic Outreach and Research and AdjunctAssistant Professor of Comparative Literature,uses the Visual History Archive to teach afreshman seminar titled “Conscience andMemory: Listening and Responding to Sur-vivors of Genocide.”

Master Teacher ProgramThe Institute hosted its third annual “Teachingwith Testimony” workshop in July, welcomingmiddle- and high school educators from acrossthe United States. As the centerpiece of the Institute’s Master Teacher Program, the profes-sional development workshop prepares educatorsto craft their own testimony-based classroom ma-terials and become ambassadors of testimony-based education in their communities. Visitdornsife.usc.edu/vhi/mtworkshop2011 for photosand more information.

Also in July, teachers who participated in2010’s “Teaching with Testimony” workshopreturned to the Institute for a follow-up work-shop, where they received certification and con-tinuing education credits from the USCRossier School of Education. Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/certification2011 for photos and more in-formation.

Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/education to learnabout the Institute’s online resources, professionaldevelopment workshops, and support services forteachers.

Faculty Stipend Program The Institute’s Faculty Stipend Program en-abled three professors to integrate testimonyinto new courses at USC during for the 2011–2012 academic year.

Alison Dundes Renteln, USC Professor of Po-litical Science and Anthropology, taught “Inter-national Human Rights,” which utilized theVisual History Archive to address issues re-lated to the Holocaust, the Rwandan Tutsigenocide, the rights of minorities, the rights ofchildren born of genocide, and remedies forgross violations of human rights.

Yaffa Weisman, Adjunct Associate Professorof Contemporary Jewish Studies at HebrewUnion College – Jewish Institute of Religion,taught “Literature of Resistance,” a course onthe literature of resistance; the course gave stu-dents an opportunity to submit multimediaprojects based on testimony from the VisualHistory Archive.

Dr. Vincent Farenga, USC Professor of Clas-sics and Comparative Literature, will teach “Lit-erature and Justice” in the spring. The coursewill involve comparative analyses of the mediawith which survivors’ narratives are capturedand the ways in which they construct theiridentities within testimony.

Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/scholarship for moreinformation about testimony-based scholarshipand research, including a full list of courses thathave used testimony from the Visual HistoryArchive. Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/locator to findthe access site nearest you.

We Remember: Cuba’s First Permanent Holocaust Exhibit Testimony from the Visual History Archive hasbeen incorporated into the first permanbent ex-hibit about the Holocaust displayed in Cuba.

“We Remember – The Holocaust and theCreation of a Living Community,” opened onDecember 18 at the Centro Sephardi (SephardicCenter) in Havana. The multimedia exhibit doc-uments key periods in the history of the CubanJewish community and illustrates the local andworldwide impact of the Holocaust. Refugeeswho arrived in Cuba to escape the Nazi regime

A global mission Top from left: Paola Carucci, Superintendent, Archivio Storico del Quirinale;Agostino Attanasio, Superintendent, Archivio Centrale dello Stato; and Kim Simon, the Institute’sManaging Director; Center: Peter Sugihara, a stu-dent in the RIPS program, presents at the Institute;Bottom from left: Rabbi Abraham Cooper, AssociateDean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; HeatherMaio, Director of Conscience Display; Stan Falken-stein, President of the Jewish Cuba Connection;Stephen D. Smith, the Institute’s Executive Director.


Summer 2012

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provide firsthand accounts of their personal ex-periences via video clips, while an hour-longvideo features testimony about survivors’ expe-riences during the war in Europe. Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/cuba2012 for photos and more infor-mation.

“Human Fates” in the Holocaust: A Resource for Teachers in HungaryThe Institute launched a new classroom lessonfor teachers in Hungary. Based on Holocaustsurvivor and rescuer testimony, Sodrodas esszembenallas – Sorsok a veszkorszakban (Driftingand Opposition – Human Fates in the Shoah) isdesigned to encourage classroom discussionabout personal dilemmas. The lesson was devel-oped in partnership with Hungary’s HolocaustMemorial Center and the Education Researchand Development Institute in Budapest.

The Institute provides online resources foreducators in 11 languages in addition to Eng-lish: Croatian, Czech, French, German, Hun-garian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish,Slovak, and Ukrainian. Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/education/international to learn more aboutthe Institute’s international work.

“Pain of Memory” Training Program in Ukraine“Pain of Memory,” a new education kit for teach-ers in Ukraine, uses testimony from the VisualHistory Archive to juxtapose memories of Holo-caust survivors and bystanders. The kit is in-tended to enhance the educational experience of“Shoah by Bullets: Mass Shootings of Jews inUkraine 1941–1944,” an exhibition based on thework of Yahad-In Unum, which conducts re-search and documentation of mass shootingsthat took place in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland.“Pain of Memory” includes bystander testimonycollected by Yahad-In Unum and survivor testi-mony collected by the Institute.

The Institute and the Ukrainian Center forHolocaust Studies have started a training pro-gram to equip secondary school teachers inUkraine to use “Pain of Memory” in the class-room. Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/painofmemory2012 to learn more.

Educational Outreachin the Czech RepublicAt a training seminar convened by the Instituteand Pant o.s., teachers learned how testimonyof local origin can be used to study the complexhistory of the border region between the CzechRepublic, Germany, and Poland. The seminartook place at the Summer School of ModernHistory, in Ostrava.

The testimonies of more than 500 Holo-caust survivors and other witnesses in theCzech Republic are preserved in the VisualHistory Archive, which is accessible to local ed-ucators at Charles University, in Prague. Visitdornsife.usc.edu/vhi/charles.

Learning from survivors Beth Meyerowitz (top left), whose course “Effects of Traumatic Experiences” usestestimony from the Visual History Archive; cover image of “Pain of Memory” (top right), an education kitfor teachers in Ukraine; professional development training at the Master Teacher Workshop (bottom).



Honoring a leader The USC Shoah Foundation Institute recognized Brian L. Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast (top left), with the 2011 Ambassador for Humanity Award, its highest honor. Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/album/afh2011 to view a photo essay from the event. Photography by FilmMagic



BRIAN L. ROBERTS, Chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, has received theUSC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Ambassador for Humanity Award. The award isreserved for individuals who embody the Institute’s values and mission to promotetolerance and mutual respect through the educational use of the testimonies in itsVisual History Archive.

Steven Spielberg presented Roberts with the Ambassador for Humanity Award—the Institute’s highest honor—in May at a gala in Roberts’s hometown of Philadel-phia, where Comcast is headquartered; it was the first time the Institute’s annual galahas taken place outside Los Angeles. Jon Bon Jovi, a veteran supporter of the Instituteand of Comcast and Roberts’s charitable work, was the special musical guest.

“Brian Roberts has been a longtime advocate of finding and developing innovativeavenues to reach and educate young people,” Spielberg said. “Working with Brianand Comcast to further explore ways to bring digital literacy to education gives megreat hope that together we can effect significant change. Brian’s vision and com-mitment to enhancing digital literacy in schools and communities across Americamake him a great ambassador for learning, and I am proud to recognize him for his

efforts in supporting the Institute’s educational work.”In addition to spotlighting Roberts for his leadership and philanthropic achievements in education and tech-

nology, the Institute outlined its mission activities and groundbreaking programs. The gala was also an oppor-tunity to highlight the partnership between Comcast and the Institute, which have collaborated on a variety ofinitiatives to advance the educational use of Holocaust survivor and witness testimony.

“I am so pleased that the USC Shoah Foundation Institute has joined forces with Brian Roberts and Comcastas we explore new ways to utilize our archive as an educational tool, and endeavor to reach a growing numberof educators and students across the country,” said Stephen D. Smith, the Institute’s Executive Director. “BrianRoberts’s foresight and leadership provide a guiding light as we work hard to have an impact on students’ atti-tudes, beliefs, and sense of responsibility for the future.”

Honoring an AmbassadorforHumanity

News & events

In his hometown of Philadelphia, Brian L. Robertsreceives the Institute’s highest honor.


“I have seen young students who have watched these testimonies. It does change them. These survivors—who are now educators—they can change the world.” - Steven Spielberg, Founder, USC Shoah Foundation Institute

Become an annual member.For the first time ever, you can become an

annual member of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Become a partner in our work as we link individuals,

educators, and students to the transformative lessons inour Visual History Archive, enabling the eyewitnesses

of history to inspire change…one voice at a time.

Join today.Visit dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/membership

G I V I N G A V O I C E T O T H O S E W H O S U RV I V E D. F U LF I LLI N G A P R O M I S E T O T H O S E W H O D I D N ’ T.


ENSURE THE INSTITU TE’S VISUAL HISTORY ARCHIVE CAN EDUCATE AND INSPIRE FOR GENERATIONS TO COME.

Board of CouncilorsSteven SpielbergHonorary Chair

Edgar M. BronfmanHonorary Co-chair

Renée Crown Honorary Co-chair

Lew WassermanHonorary Co-chair in Memoriam

Robert J. KatzChair

Susan CrownVice chair

Harry RobinsonVice chair

Wallis AnnenbergRussel BernardGerald Breslauer* Joel CitronJerome Coben* Stephen CozenDavid EismanPhyllis EpsteinEmanuel Gerard* Eric GreenbergJoel GreenbergMarcy B. GringlasMarc GrossmanYossie HollanderWilliam LauderLee LibermanSkip PaulBruce RamerMichael RutmanMickey ShapiroTad TaubeErna ViterbiHarold Williams*

* Emeritus Board member

Founding Executive DirectorsJune BeallorJames Moll

Founding Advisory CommitteeKaren KushellBranko LustigGerald R. Molen

Executive StaffStephen D. SmithExecutive Director

Kim SimonManaging Director

Sam GustmanChief Technology Officer

Karen JungblutDirector of Research and Documentation

Steven KlappholzExecutive Director of Development

Anita PaceDirector of Technology

Kori StreetDirector of Programs

Ari ZevDirector of Administration

USC

SHOAH

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INSTITUTE

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PastForward


New Dimensions

T H E D I G E S T O F T H E U S C S H O A H F O U N D A T I O N I N S T I T U T E F O R V I S U A L H I S T O R Y A N D E D U C A T I O N

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Closing the Digital DivideAn interview with Comcast Chairman & CEO brian l. roberts

When Everything ChangedHolocaust survivor and filmmaker branko lustig

Scholarship in aDigital WorldNew modes of publishing tara mcpherson

Our MissionTo overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry — and the suffering they cause — through the educational use of the Institute’s visual history testimonies

Stay in TouchBegin receiving periodic updates and information alerting you to special events in your community, new programs, and the latest Institute news. Send an email to [email protected] “pastforward” in the subject line and your name and addressin the body.

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