How "Tools" Produce "Data": Searching in a Large Digital Corpus of Audiovisual Holocaust Testimonies
Abstract
The field of Jewish Studies is facing many new challenges as a result of ongoing digitization. This chapter focuses on digital oral histories of the Hol-ocaust. Following the digital revolution in oral history, many institutions now provide access to multiple collections at once. One of the new challenges is thus related to the simultaneous availability of several archives, as well as various search engines which apply different methods to browse their content.
The aim of this chapter is to identify and describe participants' practices for working with a large corpus of audiovisual Holocaust testimonies, especially in terms of locating relevant results within the collection by using three different search systems. We have conducted an empirical study in an experimental setting designed to emulate work with various search engines. Three pairs of novice users solved ten tasks over video-conferencing software, utilizing three different search "tools" (USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, Amalach, and Pixla).
Our main find-ings consist of formulating a fundamental structure and elements of participants' collaborative work, composed of three complementary actions: testing, sharing, and implementing. Furthermore, users obtained the search results by two main approaches: aggregation and query refinement. Interestingly, they did not upgrade the searching skills progressively, but rather used the current "best knowledge" for all the tasks and search engines at once.
The participants' emergent competence was continuously developed on the basis of collaborative work with the search engines and the results obtained so far through their work on the previous tasks.