David Farivar

USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education

USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action. The Institute's efforts are rooted in the Visual History Archive®, a massive repository containing 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses to genocide and crimes against humanity. The bulk of the interviewees lived through the Holocaust, but the Visual History Archive also includes hundreds of eyewitness accounts from people who survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Guatemalan Genocide of the early 1980s, and the Cambodian Genocide of the 1970s. The Institute is continually expanding the Visual History Archive to include the voices of other survivors of mass violence. The Institute also has branched into the realm of alternate reality, inventing an interactive project called New Dimensions in Testimony. Using groundbreaking natural language software, Holocaust survivor testimonies have been powered by complex algorithms to respond in real time to questions asked by viewers that will allow audiences far into the future to have their own "virtual conversations" with witnesses to history for generations to come. Leveraging the world-class faculty and scholarly resources of its home at the University of Southern California, within the Office of the Provost, and with the vital support of the philanthropic community, the Institute strives to understand and share the insights contained within the Visual History Archive through four strategic pillars: Research, Education, Access and Global Outreach.