Ethics of the Algorithm:
Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory

A public lecture by Todd Presner (Michael and Irene Ross Professor and Chair, Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, UCLA)

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Cosponsored by USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World

(Join us in person or online on Zoom)

The Holocaust is one of the most documented – and now digitized – events in human history. Institutions and archives hold hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video testimony, composed of more than a billion words in dozens of languages, with millions of pieces of descriptive metadata. It would take several lifetimes to engage with these testimonies one at a time. Computational methods could be used to analyze an entire archive – but what are the ethical implications of “listening” to Holocaust testimonies by means of an algorithm? In his new book, Todd Presner explores how the digital humanities can provide both new insights and humanizing perspectives for Holocaust memory and history.

REGISTER HERE

Todd Presner is Professor of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and holds the Michael and Irene Ross Chair in the Division of Humanities. He is the author of Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains and Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration and the coauthor of Digital_Humanities and Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City.

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