| USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education | |
| Type: | Research and Education Institute |
| Founded: | 1994 by Steven Spielberg in the United States |
| Location: | Los Angeles, California |
| Headquarters: | University of Southern California |
| Key People: | Dr. Robert Williams (Executive Director), Lee Liberman (Chair) |
USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, formerly Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust (which in Hebrew is called the Shoah) a compelling voice for education and action.[1] It was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, one year after completing his Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List. In January 2006, the foundation partnered with and relocated to the University of Southern California (USC) and was renamed the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. In March 2019, the institute opened their new global headquarters[2] on USC's campus.
The foundation's testimonies are preserved in the Visual History Archive.[3] The archive is digitized, fully searchable via indexed keywords, and hyperlinked. With more than 112,000 hours of testimony, indexing allows students, teachers, professors, researchers and others around the world to retrieve entire testimonies or search for specific sections within testimonies. Each testimony is indexed by a native speaker and each minute of video is timecoded in English. They average a little over two hours each in length and were conducted in 65 countries and 44 languages.
Since its inception, the archive has expanded its collection to include testimony from survivors and witnesses of other genocides, including the Rwandan genocide,[4] the Nanjing Massacre, Armenian genocide, Guatemalan genocide, Cambodian genocide, Rohingya genocide and the Bosnian genocide, as well as a collection of contemporary Antisemitism.[5] In December 2023, the foundation launched a collection of testimonies from the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel in cooperation with Tablet Studios.[6] [7] Its collections include:
The foundation claims to aspire to be the world's academic authority on the study of genocide and personal testimony.[14] It continues to incorporate new collections of genocide eyewitness testimonies while also fostering scholarly activities that confront real-world problems the testimonies address. Scholars in many fields have utilized the resources of the Visual History Archive to teach more than 400 university courses across four continents, including 112 courses at USC.
The Center for Advanced Genocide Research is the research and scholarship unit of the foundation. Founded in 2014, the center engages in interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and genocide, more specifically the origins of genocide and how to intervene in the cycle that leads to mass violence. It holds international conferences and workshops and hosts fellows and scholars in residence to conduct research using the resources available at the University of Southern California. Institute fellows, staff and student interns participate in more than a dozen academic events on the USC campus annually. it focusses on interdisciplinary study organized around three themes: "Resistance to Genocide and Mass Violence" focuses on acts of resistance and elements of defiance that slow down or stop genocidal processes. "Violence, Emotion and Behavioral Change" studies the nature of genocide and mass violence and how they impact emotional, social, psychological, historical and physical behavior.
The foundation, in conjunction with its Center for Advanced Genocide Research, held an international conference in November 2014 at USC "Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler's List".[15] In 2015, in collaboration with the Thornton School of Music and USC Visions and Voices, it hosted the international conference "Singing in the Lion's Mouth: Music as Resistance to Violence", including two days of programming that highlighted the use of music as a tool to resist oppression and spread awareness.[16]
Digital Genocide Studies examines how big data and large datasets, including the 53,000 testimonies in the foundation's Visual History Archive, can be used to find patterns in the field of mass violence and its resistance. The institute also organizes a yearly series of academic events that brings scholars to USC to present lectures, film screenings and panel discussions. The Visual History Archive is fully viewable at 51 subscribing institutions in 13 countries around the world, mainly universities and museums. The institute also offers a subscription for partial access to the Archive. About 211 institutions in 34 countries have contracted for these smaller collections.
About 1,200 testimonies are available to any member of the public with an Internet connection who registers to access the Visual History Archive Online. The institute dedicates attention to maintaining each testimony's audio-visual quality, to protect it from degrading over time. With contributions from technology companies, the institute devised a preservation system where the original videos were digitized into a variety of commonly used formats. The digitization of the entire Archive took five years to complete, from 2008 to 2012. During the digitization project, it was discovered that about 5 percent of the 235,005 tapes had audio or visual problems, some to the point of being unwatchable. Finding there were few existing options for restoring tape-based material, the institute's ITS team created new software programs to help them recover both audio and visual problems. The institute has created a digital collections management technology used by clients to preserve their ageing media. Among them are the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and Warner Bros. Pictures. Also under the Access umbrella is the institute's collections unit, which works to expand the Visual History Archive by conducting additional interviews, integrating testimony taken by other institutions, and providing training on the institute's preferred methodology for gathering testimony.
Using testimony from the Archive, the foundation develops teaching tools for educators across the disciplinary spectrum, such as social studies, English Language Arts, government, foreign language, world history, American history, and character education. The institute also provides professional development to prepare educators worldwide to use testimony in relevant and engaging ways—providing an experience that takes students beyond the textbook.[17]
IWitness, the institute's flagship educational website, provides students access to 1,600 testimonies for guided exploration. They can engage with the testimonies and bring them into their own multimedia projects via a built-in video editor. Approximately 17,000 high school students and over 5,000 educators in 57 countries and all 50 U.S. states have used the site.[18] It has trained more than 39,000 educators around the world to incorporate testimony into classroom lessons.[19] More than 200 educators have participated in advanced training and the Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century programs in the U.S., Ukraine, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland.[20]
The foundation's other education programs include:
In addition to the foundation's Visual History Archive and IWitness, the institute's has a YouTube channel, and Web portals in 12 languages. The complete Visual History Archive is available at 49 institutions around the world, while smaller collections are available at 199 sites in 33 countries. The institute will continue to develop digital technologies to preserve and enhance the Visual History Archive, while building access pathways for students, educators, scholars and the general public. Approximately 1.6 million people view the testimonies every year.[21] The Visual History Archive features more than 1,200 testimonies accessible worldwide.[22]
In 2015, the foundation added Global Outreach as its fourth organizational pillar. In one year — between 2013–2014 and 2014–15 – the number of people reached by its testimony nearly doubled, from 3.6 million to 6.5 million. The number increases to 15 million when including media exposure, TV broadcasts, museum exhibits, presentations at conferences and workshops, and social media. Global outreach is conducted through websites, documentaries, and exhibits, as well as national and international press coverage about its programs; and shared media on social platforms.
Since 1999 the USC Shoah Foundation annually receives Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service volunteers from the Gedenkdienst program of the Austrian Service Abroad.