More Watching, Less Searching: Repurposing Fortunoff Archive Metadata for Visual Searching

The Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies and the Yale Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) began building a Visual Search tool in 2019 in order to provide a simple overview of the Fortunoff Archive’s collection and enable quick filtering and discovery of relevant testimonies. Before this, researchers who were new to Fortunoff’s collection would often find searching for testimonies in Yale’s public access catalogue an opaque process.

Tests within the Fortunoff Archive and Yale Digital Humanities Lab have shown that this Visual Search tool is useful to researchers. This blogpost discusses the steps taken to develop the Visual Search tool, as well as the feedback that was received during these initial tests. Furthermore, it provides a walk-through of steps to searching, filtering and visualising data found within the archive.

Learning outcome

After viewing this training resource, users will be able to:

• search, filter and visualise data found within the Fortunoff archive.