Date: 20–21 October 2025
Venue: Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Na Florenci 1420/3, Prague 1)
Submission deadline: 30 June 2025, submissions in Czech or English should be directed to sedlicka@mua.cas.cz. The event will be interpreted into both languages.
Notification of acceptance: 31 July 2025
Eyewitness accounts represent a crucial source for Holocaust research. These narratives offer the perspective of the individuals directly involved and create a more nuanced picture of the past. They are an essential and invaluable source, especially in areas where other documentation is limited or nonexistent.
The workshop will focus on how new (especially linguistic) technologies are transforming historical research, and on the potential for public engagement in the creation and annotation of testimony corpora (citizen science). One of our goals is to bring together leading European experts in linguistic and digital humanities with researchers who work with Holocaust survivor testimonies as part of their daily scholarly activity. We will explore the possibilities of analyzing Holocaust testimonies using innovative digital methods and tools—such as automatic entity recognition and tagging (of people, places) in texts and their linking to controlled vocabularies. The program will also include practical hands-on testing of selected tools and methods based on technologies such as neural networks and machine learning (AI).
The event is open to a wide range of participants—from experienced scholars to students and newcomers to digital methods. Together, we will explore the intersections between technological tools and the needs of users with varying levels of experience.
Submissions:
If your research involves sources that can be considered as Holocaust testimonies and you are interested in exploring how they can be analyzed using digital tools, please submit the following by June 30, 2025:
A short CV (max. 200 words)
An abstract (max. 250 words) introducing your dataset – its strengths, limitations, and, if applicable, the tools that would help your research.
The dataset may consist of a small collection of testimonies or even a single individual text. For the purposes of this workshop, we understand "testimony" in a broad sense – early postwar testimonies or transcripts/statements from war crimes trials may also be included. The source must, however, be in textual form.
Selected participants will be asked to submit a sample from their dataset approximately one month before the workshop for the hands-on session.
