The Impact of Digital Editing on the Study of Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies in the context of Voci dall’Inferno Project

AbstractIn Nazi concentration camps, approximately 20 million people perished. This included young and old, men and women, Jews, dissidents, and homosexuals. Only 10% of those deported survived. This paper introduces “Voci dall’Inferno” project, which aims to achieve two key objectives: a) Create a comprehensive digital archive: by encoding a corpus of non-literary testimonies including both written and oral sources. b) Analyze the use of Dante’s language: by identifying the presence of Dante’s lexicon and allusions. Currently, the project holds 47 testimonies, with 29 transcribed in full text and 18 encoded using the XML-TEI format. This project is propelled by a multidisciplinary and educational context with experts in humanities and computer science. The project’s findings will be disseminated through a user-friendly web application built on an XML foundation. Though currently in its prototyping phase, the application boasts several features, including a search engine for testimonies, terms, or phrases within the corpus. Additionally, a browsing interface allows users to read and listen the original testimonies, while a visualization tool enables deeper exploration of the corpus’s content. Adhering to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines, the project ensures a structured digital archive, aligned with the FAIR principles for data accessibility and reusability.