Website: https://elts.ucla.edu/person/todd-presner/
Principal Investigator(s): Prof. Todd Presner, ELTS
Todd Presner, as part of his research into the terrible aftermath of genocide, investigates the ways computational tools and digital archives can help us preserve memory, ask new historical questions, and understand the various roles of survivor testimony. His work focuses especially on the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (https://sfi.usc.edu/), the largest video archive of survivor testimonies of the Holocaust (Jews, Sinti and Roma, political prisoners, Jehovah’s witnesses, and homosexuals) as well as testimonies by survivors of the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the Nanjing Massacres. As much as possible, he brought the research into his undergraduate classes.
Given the fact that genocide is not something in the distant past, but very much part of our contemporary world and, in all likelihood, the future, too, the questions of how we learn from the past, archive the memories of the past, and analyze the meaning of testimony are critically urgent. And given that the knowledge, archives, and analyses will deploy computational tools more and more, the class focuses on the memory and meaning of genocide in the 21st century.