The Shape of Testimony: A Scalable Framework for Oral History Archive Comparison

ArXi:2605.21623v1 Announce Type: new Researchers in Holocaust studies have often distinguished between two styles of oral survivor testimony: the USC Shoah Foundation's interviews tend to follow a structured, interviewer-guided format, whereas the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive generally favors a free-form, open-ended style. This distinction has influenced both scholarly research and the development of later archives. In this study, we critically examine that claim by conducting a large-scale computational analysis of than 1,600 testimonies from both collections. Leveraging dis.