CrossEWT: Cross-Medial Analysis of World War II Eyewitness Testimonies

The CLARIAH research pilot project ‘CrossEWT’ entailed an inventory of interviews with eyewitnesses of the Second World War as published in newspapers, television documentaries and oral history databases. The aim was to analyse the topics of these interviews, and how these may have differed per medium and over time since 1945. The Media Suite facilitates comparative research into collections of different media types that traditionally are studied separately. Especially for oral history research, this is innovative and promising, in at least two ways. First, it potentially stimulates the re-use of interviews, not only by media scholars who might accidentally discover this material, but by (oral) historians as well. Second, a video annotation tool is provided that enables analysing the visual, non-verbal and performative aspects of oral history interviews, while traditional oral history research often heavily relies on the transcript.