Revisiting Let Them Speak: a digital edition of Holocaust testimonies

Nearly ten years ago, the Fortunoff Archive welcomed Gabor Mihaly Toth to its staff as a joint research fellow with the Yale Digital Humanities Lab. Inspired by the idea that the last wish of those who were murdered in the Holocaust was to be remembered, Toth helped launch Let Them Speak (LTS), a new interactive platform giving viewers access to the collective voice of Holocaust victims of hundreds of testimonies from Fortunoff Archive, USC Shoah Foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Let Them Speak is now a digital monograph and a digital edition of nearly 3,000 testimonies empowered by tools of data visualization and text mining. It provides an accessible and interactive glimpse into testimonies, fragments and critical texts from the three participating archives' collections and scholarship.

The site can be accessed here.

Since its release, hundreds of visitors have explored the testimonies and the collective voice of Holocaust victims. Leading scholars wrote two reviews on the project:

https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/pub/in-search-of-the-drowned/release/2 by Jan Burzlaff, Harvard University.

https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article/37/1/182/7084842 by Todd Presner, UCLA.

Toth has since published two award-winning papers based on LTS and the concepts behind the project:

- Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History (Institute of Historical Research, London): Studying Large-Scale Behavioral Differences in Auschwitz-Birkenau with Simulation of Gendered Narratives (link: https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/3/000622/000622.html)

- Luxembourg Science Writing Competition (Fonds National de Recherche, Luxembourg): History, Loss, and Your GPS: Reconstructing the Past (link: https://science.lu/de/science-writing-competition-2024/history-loss-and-your-gps-reconstructing-past)