Overview

The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University Library houses nearly 12,000 hours of survivor and witness interviews. In partnership with the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, the Fortunoff Archive developed a new search tool enabling quick and comprehensive discovery of materials. The goal was to help researchers spend less time searching for and more time watching testimonies.

Visual Search is a data dashboard that visualizes key metadata attributes from Fortunoff Archive testimonies. Through interaction with these visualizations, researchers can narrow the collection down to a subset of testimonies linked by common attribute values. In addition to identifying relevant testimonies, the visual search tool helps researchers better understand the shape and growth of the collection over time, as well as the demographic constitution of the survivors and witnesses who gave their testimony to the archive.

The visualization platform is meant to augment conventional catalog search tools, such as Yale’s Quick Search and the Fortunoff Archive’s primary discovery and access tool Aviary. These traditional catalog interfaces allow researchers to build robust queries, but there are some disadvantages. Query-based searching can require significant knowledge up front about the subject matter, the collection itself, and its indexing. As a result, researchers may have difficulty finding a relevant testimony if they don’t already know the vocabulary that will help them form an effective query. Visual Search is designed to invert that query-based paradigm by requiring no up-front knowledge, allowing new and experienced users to learn more about the collection—and the metadata used to describe it—by a process of discovering through interactive browsing.

Published under a GNU Public License, Visual Search is free and open source. To see and use the underlying code, visit the Fortunoff Archive’s GitHub Repository.