The USC Libraries recently partnered with the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and the USC Shoah Foundation to launch Voices of Survival, an immersive online platform that allows visitors to have real-time conversations with genocide survivors.
The innovative, richly historical interactive experience deepens empathy and encourages personal connections to the survivors’ experiences. This technology-based approach ensures that their firsthand accounts will remain accessible for future generations.
Voices of Survival includes interactive video testimonies from survivors along with multimedia stories, maps, and timelines that trace their personal stories and allow online visitors to learn from their experiences. The platform includes testimonies from Holocaust survivors Marion Deichmann, Aaron Elster, Fritzie Fritzshall, and Rodi Glass and 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda survivor Kizito D. Kalima.
The immersive platform uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies that allow you to ask questions and have conversations with the five survivors on a wide range of topics related to their life histories. Their responses are taken directly from video interviews, so the interactive technologies preserve the fidelity of their words and ensure the historical and biographical accuracy of the Voices of Survival experience.
The project builds on the longstanding partnership between the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center (IHMEC) and expertise at the USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Libraries. Voices of Survival advances the USC Libraries' commitment to advancing digital storytelling and historical preservation through emerging technologies. The project includes interviews created for the Interactive Interviews platform developed by the USC Digital Repository and the Dimensions in Testimony platform developed by the USC Shoah Foundation.
The project was made possible by the expertise and dedication of Catherine Gao, Mike Jones, Neha Rao, and Craig Stubing of the USC Libraries and USC Digital Repository and Svetlana Ushakova of the USC Shoah Foundation.