Having such a large archive, the USC Shoah Foundation decided to create the educational platform IWitness. It is a curated platform for educators to help narrow down testimonies. About 4,000 testimonies are accessible and categorized by locations and languages. Educators can have a very global approach or a very local one. The platform offers universal lessons created for them, but it is crucial to understand the geography, culture, language, and context they are in. Another experience that is also part of the IWitness project is Dimensions in Testimony, interactive biographies. This is a very different approach
to accessing and using testimonies. Around 2010, when it became clear that fewer
and fewer survivors were able to come to schools to share their testimonies, the foundation began thinking about a new technological way to create an interface for students to ask their own questions directly to survivors. Keeping the interaction aspect between students and survivors at the center of their thinking process, the USC Shoah Foundation started
to develop a methodology to interview and film survivors to create a holographic display.
It can be projected as if the person were sitting in front of the participants on the stage. Questions can be asked directly to the projection. For example, Eva Kor was interviewed
for this project for over a week and she was asked about a thousand questions.
The downside is that this method cannot be adapted to previous testimonies as it requires
a specific technological process and interviewing methodology. There are a number
of these testimonies now on the IWitness platform with guidelines and activities that help provide context. Thanks to this process, participants can ask survivors their own question and get a natural answer as if they were having a real conversation with that person.
This recording differs from an AI system because the response has been fully recorded.
The answers given by survivors were entirely spoken by them. Institutions might be afraid that technology would interfere with what is being said and that students would be distracted by this tool, however, the last nine years of evaluations and observations
by the foundation confirm that content is what stays with students, not the technology.
Karen Jungblut, photo: Press Office