The Shape of Testimony: A Scalable Framework for Oral History Archive Comparison

2026-05-20

AI Summary

This study interrogates the prevailing scholarly assumption that “structured” and “free-form” interview styles in Holocaust survivor oral histories constitute a strict binary. Drawing on a corpus of over 1,600 archival testimonies, the research employs discourse segmentation, topic modeling, and large language models to quantitatively assess interview structure across dimensions such as thematic coherence, question-answer dynamics, and question typology. Moving beyond conventional dichotomous frameworks, the findings reveal substantial overlap between the two styles at the level of individual narratives, thereby challenging the notion of mutually exclusive categorization. The work not only establishes a scalable and reproducible computational paradigm for oral history analysis but also opens new avenues for digital humanities scholarship and the design of citizen science platforms.

Abstract

Researchers in Holocaust studies have often distinguished between two styles of oral survivor testimony: the USC Shoah Foundation's interviews tend to follow a structured, interviewer-guided format, whereas the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive generally favors a more free-form, open-ended style. This distinction has influenced both scholarly research and the development of later archives. In this study, we critically examine that claim by conducting a large-scale computational analysis of more than 1,600 testimonies from both collections. Leveraging discourse segmentation, topic modeling, and large language model (LLM) based analysis, we quantify the "structuredness" level of testimonies through topic coherence, interviewer-survivor dynamics, and the distribution of question types. Our results generally corroborate the structural differences identified in earlier research, while also revealing significant overlaps between the collections, both within individual interviews and across common narrative patterns. This complicates the simple "structured vs. free-form" dichotomy often applied to these oral histories. Beyond revisiting a foundational claim in Holocaust studies, our work provides a scalable, replicable framework for comparative corpus analysis. As a proof of concept, it suggests broader applications for digital oral history, narrative analysis, and the design of citizen-science annotation platforms.

Problem

• oral history
• testimony structure
• Holocaust studies
• interview style
• narrative analysis

Innovation

• computational oral history
• discourse segmentation
• topic modeling
• large language models
• comparative corpus analysis