Early Career Research Day winners seek to preserve genocidal testimonies' validity through quantitative data
 IDRE’s Early Career Research Day recognized Anna Bonazzi and Lizhou Fan’s research, Language Use and Narrative Structures in Genocide Interviews via Digital Humanities, as one of the top four posters presented. More than 80 researchers participated in the poster session event with 40 high-quality research posters on November 20, 2019.
Bonazzi and Fan’s research aims to better understand genocide experiences by analyzing survivor tesitomonies’ language use and narrative structure with a digital humanities approach.
They hope to preserve the validity of genocide victims’ experiences by adding quantitative data to the victims’ recorded stories. Bonazzi and Fan also intend to analyze and question the conventions of testimony as a genre influenced by Holocaust experiences.
“Most of these survivors are elderly or dead, and they cannot advocate for themselves anymore,” said Bonazzi, a Ph.D. student in UCLA’s Department of Germanic Languages.
The first collection of testimonies they analyzed came from Holocaust survivors who were interviewed in 1946 by Professor David Boder from the Illinois Institute of Technology. The researchers also studied the Shoah Foundation’s video recordings of survivors of various massacres including the Armenian genocide, the Nanjing massacre, the Rwandan genocide, and the Holocaust.
Bonazzi and Fan’s findings point to larger trends in all the survivors’ speeches. Using computational indexing through Python and R programming, they uncovered patterns in language choice, code switching and main topics.
Read the full article on IDRE's website.
|
UCLA launched 
