Jewish History

Ildikó Barna (Eötvös Loránd University)

Beginning from the early summer of 1945, employees of the National Committee for Attending Deportees (DEGOB) started to record the testimonies of deportees returning to Hungary. Originally, approximately 5,000 protocols were created. For decades, it seemed that this invaluable collection of early testimonies perished. Some years later, more than 3,600 typewritten protocols were found by chance in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archive. In 2020, the ELTE Research Center for Computational Social Science started a three-year research project aiming at examining this invaluable collection by not only treating it as a source of oral history but approach it with the tools of computational history and computational social science. The main aim of the presentation is to show the potential of these new methods for analyzing such data and the way they can complement our existing knowledge. As it is an ongoing research, only preliminary results will be presented. However, the presentation will not only talk about the results, but also about the way to get there which is particularly important for these new methods.