A lesson about how the collection of interviews with concentration camp survivors created by psychologist David Boder in 1946 was turned into an interactive website in 2000 and 2009.
This lesson is meant to teach students to apply source criticism to audio interviews that were recorded with now obsolete technology in 1946, before being digitised and published on the web in 2000 and 2009. The central point is whether the meaning and value of an interview changes when it is transferred from its original context of creation to a context of preservation and eventually digitisation.
A short animation lasting 6 minutes 30 seconds tells the story of the various transformations of Boder’s collection of interviews. The topics that are briefly touched on in the short animation are discussed in more depth in a series of assignments. These are suitable either for working individually or for collaborative work for two or three students. The time required for each varies from 30 to 60 minutes.
Those who might want to do some preparatory reading on David Boder can choose one or more of the following key publications:
Simone Gigliotti, “The Voice As a Human Document: Listening to Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Europe”. Yad Vashem Studies 40 no.2 (2012) : 217-235
Alan Rosen, “‘We know very little in America’, David Boder and un-belated testimony”, In: After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. David Cesarani and Eric J.Sundquist, (New York, 2012)
Rachel Deblinger, “David P. Boder, Holocaust Memory in Displaced Persons Camps”, In: After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. David Cesarani and Eric J.Sundquist, (New York, 2012)
David Boder’s interview collection: from analogue to digital
An account describing how the collection of interviews with concentration camp survivors created by David Boder in 1946 was turned into an interactive website in 2009.
David Boder’s interview collection: from analogue to digital
Read this introduction, enter the interactive animation, then choose one of the assignments
In this version of the clip you need to click on a rectangular black box with a white title that appears on the bottom left corner of your screen to enter a window with additional information on a specific topic. The alternative to playing the clip and waiting until a box appears is to click on the index in the bottom left corner of the screen, that shows an overview of all the 12 boxes and topics.
Since the clip covers a wide range of topics ranging from physics and reproduction technology to the historiography of the Holocaust and interview methodology, the assignments can be connected to a broad variety of courses. Lecturers can select the most appropriate assignment(s) by looking at the tags in the metadata.
One might wonder why students of a humanities discipline should learn about the obsolete technology of the wire recorder. The reason is to understand the difference between the physics of capturing sound in the analogue era and how this relates to the physics of digital technology. Practising digital source criticism is about more than just reflecting on the informational value of a historical source. It also means considering the transmitter of information and its material qualities. With digital information technology now so pervasive in our everyday life, it is important to understand the underlying physical phenomena and to be able to reflect on how the shift from analogue to digital has affected our use of technology.
When reflecting on the value and meaning of a source that has been published on the web, it is important to take the context of its creation into consideration. Turning everything into searchable digital data raises the risk of disregarding the different methods and approaches used by researchers when they created the data. This assignment is designed to highlight the differences between the accounts of Holocaust survivors that were summarised in written reports and those recorded on a device by Boder. They are both accessible online, but what is the difference? What can you do with this material that was not possible when it was kept in an archive? For this assignment, we invite you to work with the following websites:
- DEGOB - National Committee for Attending Deportees. Recollections of the Holocaust - The world’s most extensive testimonial site http://degob.org/index.php. This is a collection of testimonies collected by the Hungarian National Commission for Deportees.
- Voices of the Holocaust https://voices.library.iit.edu/
In the animation about Boder, photographs of victims and of families have been used without clarifying their identity. This is done to create an association. The photo stands for a group or for a societal-cultural context. In a sense the same effect is created with the newsreels about the liberated concentration camps, as Boder observed: people are portrayed as an anonymous group, disregarding their individuality.
Because this lesson is about source criticism, we have tried to trace the context in which these photos were taken and the names of the people who are portrayed. The assignment invites students to search for the context in which these photos were taken and how they ended up in this animation.
In this assignment we are going to trace the identity of the families portrayed in the photos, as they lived their lives before the Second World War. Just as in assignment 4, they are portrayed as an anonymous group of people. Their personal identity, their name, age and background are not mentioned in the animation. They have been used to illustrate a situational context. Because this lesson is about source criticism, we have traced back the context in which these photos were taken and the names of the people who are portrayed. The assignment challenges students to search for the context in which these photos were taken and how they ended up in this animation.
Boder’s approach shifted from that of a traditional social scientist looking for evidence to that of an ethnographer documenting people’s expressions. The footage shown in this box was shot in Henonville but it only shows moving images of people without sound. The sound is stored on a separate medium. This assignment is designed to make students aware of the multimodal dimension of a source and how the web facilitates access to these different modes. You will be asked to reflect on the context of creation, the context of preservation and the context of digitisation of the material.
As described in the clip, Boder conducted his interviews in difficult circumstances. It was hard for him to find a quiet place where he could be alone with his interviewees. This affected the quality of his recordings, and probably also the length of the interviews. To give you an idea of these circumstances you can watch a video created by Yad Vashem on the situation in displacement camps. This assignment is designed to help you reflect on displacement camps as the first places of “knowledge production” about the Holocaust.
Boder reworked his basic sources, the transcripts of his interviews, to be published in his first book. In the interactive version you can see a PDF of part of his book. When consulting a book consisting of a textual representation of a spoken interview that has been translated from German to English, one should be conscious of the alterations that occur. The purpose of this assignment is to show how one source, an audio recording, can be represented in different forms depending on the specific conventions of the medium. You are going to compare the same interview as it was published in the book in 1948 with its digital online representation created in 2009.
The possibilities for reproduction of text and images increased considerably during Boder’s lifetime. As well as the mimeograph, he used the microcard to disseminate his volumes of transcripts among various universities and research institutes.
This assignment is intended to develop an understanding of how the introduction of communication technologies increased individuals’ ability to spread a message.
Reduced costs and easy-to-manage protocols mean that lay people not familiar with printing technologies are now able to disseminate their work.
The list of universities and research institutes that received a copy of Boder’s transcripts shows the places he considered to be important centres of knowledge that could benefit from his work. At present Boder’s legacy is concentrated in a limited number of institutes, mostly within the United States.
This assignment is designed to juxtapose Boder’s efforts to spread his work with the current geographical spread of institutes that preserve part of his legacy.
You will be asked to create a map and mark the places with institutes that hold parts of his legacy. In addition you will conduct research on how digital communication technologies are used to create online access to Boder’s work.
The statements of Iranian President Ahmadinejad reported in the press in 2005 were said to have played a decisive part in mobilising resources to publish all of Boder’s work online. Understandably, statements that question whether the Holocaust actually occurred trigger heated and emotional debates. Nevertheless, each statement that appears in the press, regardless of the medium, should be subjected to careful source criticism. This applies to historians as well as journalists. This assignment will help students identify the sources upon which the news about Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial was based, explore how this news spread and examine how it was represented by the international press.
In 1946, Edith Zierer, who was only fifteen years old, was interviewed by David Boder at the Bellevue orphanage for displaced Jewish children in Paris. The interview was conducted in German. 57 years later, in June 2003, she was interviewed again in Hebrew by an interviewer from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The purpose of this assignment is to illustrate how the narrative on a similar topic – experiences in concentration camps and their impact on one’s life – changes over time and is determined by the age and status of both interviewer and narrator. You will be comparing features of the interview held in 1946 to the one conducted in 2003.