USC Shoah Foundation

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 currently has more than 55,000 video testimonies, each one a unique source of insight and knowledge that offers powerful stories from history that demand to be explored and shared.

The testimonies are preserved in the Visual History Archive, one of the largest digital collections of its kind in the world. They average a little over two hours each in length and were conducted in 62 countries and 41 languages. The vast majority of the testimonies contain a complete personal history of life before, during, and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide.

The Visual History Archive is digitized, fully searchable via indexed keywords, and hyperlinked to the minute. With more than 115,000 hours of testimony stored in the Archive, indexing technology is essential for enabling users to pinpoint topics of interest.

Indexing allows students, teachers, professors, researchers and others around the world to retrieve entire testimonies or search for specific sections within testimonies through a set of more than 64,800 keywords and phrases, 1.86 million names, and 718,000 images.

Using testimony from the Visual History Archive, the Institute has developed innovative learning tools geared toward middle and high school students and teacher training programs that optimize the use of testimony in diverse educational settings worldwide – providing an experience that takes students beyond textbooks for more impactful learning.

IWitness is the Institute’s signature educational website for teachers and their students. The free site has been used by students and educators in all 50 states and over 80 countries including Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, Australia and France.

Stored on the IWitness platform are 2,224 full-length testimonies from the Visual History Archive. The platform’s built-in learning activities are designed around short, curated clips.

IWitness learning activities enhance existing curriculum across many subject areas including social studies, English Language Arts, government, foreign language, world history, American history, and character education.

The Center for Advanced Genocide Research is the research and scholarship unit of the Institute.

Founded in 2014, the Center is dedicated to advancing new areas of interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and genocide, specifically discussing the origins of genocide and how to intervene in the cycle that leads to mass violence.

The Center holds international conferences and workshops and hosts fellows and scholars in residence to conduct research using the vast resources available at the University of Southern California. It distinguishes itself by focusing on interdisciplinary study organized around three themes to advance the analysis of genocide and systematic mass violence on an international scale.