Emotions In Oral History Interviews: A Multimodal Approach to Holocaust Testimonies

Abstract

Video interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses comprise, to date, the most globally distributed and comprehensive oral history documentation. As survivors among us disappear, these sources are increasingly important to understand the impact of the Holocaust and mechanisms to overcome the trauma experienced. While historians often rely on written transcripts, these omit emotional nuances conveyed through audiovisual cues such as facial expressions, pauses, and eye movements. This article outlines the resources, data-preparation steps, and analytical methods used during a 10-day Digital Humanities Hackathon project to examine emotions in Holocaust testimonies, incorporating video, audio, and text. The group aimed to determine whether audiovisual signals offer meaningful emotional or sentimental information beyond transcripts. To achieve this, the group worked with a sample of 10 interviews facilitated by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM); which were separated into video, audio, and textual components for machine processing and realigned side-by-side for analysis. This resulting "cookbook" lays out a workflow, resources, and practical entry points for preparing oral history interviews for multimodal emotion and sentiment annotation, or to aid the detection of emotionally significant moments for deeper examination.

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