The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is delighted to announce that it is the recipient of a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The Delmas Foundation, which was established to promote “the advancement and perpetuation of humanistic inquiry and artistic creativity,” will help the Archive transcribe the oldest testimonies in its collection, which were recorded between 1979 and 1981 by the Archive’s predecessor organization: the Holocaust Survivors Film Project.
The project, Voice to Print: Transcribing the Early Years of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, will produce high-quality, verbatim transcripts for over 300 hours of video testimony. The transcripts will be ingested into the Fortunoff Archive’s digital access system and made available to researchers, as well as serve as a test bed for digital humanities research by the Archive’s incoming Fortunoff Archive/Digital Humanities Lab postdoctoral assistant.
This project is designed as a pilot to help the Archive plan a future effort to transcribe the entire collection, which consists of approximately 12,000 hours of testimony in over a dozen different languages.