Voices of the Holocaust

I began this exercise wanting to find a musical project. In previous blog exercises for other courses, I've found that music is a great source of inspiration and an interesting place to explore and illustrate concepts. I had hoped I might find something interesting connected to Steve Reich, a composer whose scores present challenges even within traditional notation, let alone encoding into a new format. I know that the TEI Music SIG provides an exploration of TEI, but I thought it might be helpful to stay inside the realm of the TEI guidelines, in that it might inform my current project. The search for something musical for this post appeared fruitless...

In my subsequent searches I came across the Voices of the Holocaust archive, run by the Illinois institute of Technology: http://voices.iit.edu/ . The project presents an interactive experience where users can explore interviews (recorded in 1946) with World War II holocaust survivors. One can search for these audio  recordings based on participant name, language, date, location, religion, concentration camp, and nationality. One can also access these interviews by clicking on an interactive maps which display locations of camps, ghettos, and where the interviewee was located during the invasion.

http://voices.iit.edu/maps?type=camp

One reason for encoding the transcriptions in XML was so that subtitles could be included with audio recordings. This connects to one of my only professional experiences with XML prior to this course: syncing closed-captions to streaming videos. Helpfully, the site explicitly notes that it used TEI conventions for encoding the transcripts on its "Project Notes" page: http://voices.iit.edu/project_notes . Even better, the project website offers an example of the XML code and explore what the project team deemed necessary and helpful to capture and include: http://voices.iit.edu/xml/voth_project_tei_example.xml

Scrolling through this code was both informative and enlightening. Seeing a tag for publishing and copyright statements came as a surprise - I had not thought to consider ownership or publishing rights to these recordings. Tags for capturing  the name of the person who recorded the material and the equipment they used to record appealed to my own interests in recording audio.
However, it was the section on participant information that I found most enthralling. I saw the question of gender and sex outlined by Flanders (p.72) further reduced to a simple binary of male of female: 

<sex value="[1 or 2]">[male or female]</sex> 

The item which presumably informs the UI search field of religion is named to as faith in the XML: 

<faith>[faith]</faith>

I think this demonstrates how slippery language and naming can be: does the archive and specifically the schema allow for differences and nuances between religious heritage (which I see captured in the term religion) and religious belief (which is suggested by the use of faith)? The journeys of faith in holocaust victims and survivors are no doubt complex: How many lost their faith? How many found their experiences strengthened and galvanized their beliefs? Does the encoding schema allow one to search for Jewish-born survivors who, post-WWII, consider(ed) themselves atheist? Can we locate the stories of survivors who found God through their experiences? Is it reductive to cram such profound human experience into fixed categories? Are we better to hear everyone's stories and do our analysis outside of the coding?

I was most taken with what was captured in the following code:  

<trait type="tattoo"><desc>[tattoo number]</desc></trait>

Those held in concentration camps were assigned and tattooed with a number; people were systematically reduced to a series of letters and digits, and by doing so they were stripped of their humanity and dignity. But after the liberation of the camps, after World War II, what did those tattoos become?  Can such a mark become emblematic of human life sustained by hope and resilience? In a project such as the Voices of the Holocaust archive, what was (and remains) an undeniably insidious cataloguing of a life, can be seen as harnessing a way to connect survivors to survivors, connect one generation to another, and as a  restoration and celebration of the humanity and dignity of holocaust victims and survivors.

https://musicintheholocaust.org/2012/05/17/steve-reich-different-trains-1988/

In a strange way, I came full circle, back to Steve Reich. One of his pieces, Different Trains, features interviews with holocaust survivors and juxtaposes field recordings and recollections of train journeys happening simultaneously in the US and Germany during World War II. I think this piece offers an experience similar to that of the Voices of the Holocaust archive; it is the vision of a single artist yet it explores ideas of location and human experience in a complex and compelling way. Different Trains might prove an interesting challenge to encode, from a practical point of view (syncing transcriptions to the music) and from a theoretical viewpoint: how might one encode simultaneous events and meanings which are literally and figuratively juxtaposed through harmony and discord?

References

Flanders, Julia. 2012. “Collaboration and Dissent: Challenges of Collaborative Standards for  Digital Humanities.” In Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities, edited by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty, 68-80. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.