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Manuk Avedikyan indexes Armenian testimonies (Photo: USC Shoah Foundation)
LOS ANGELES (USC Shoah Foundation)””All testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian Genocide collection have been indexed and will be integrated into the Visual History Archive (VHA) in the coming months.
Indexer Manuk Avedikyan completed the last 88 of the 333 testimonies in the collection last week. The collection was first introduced with 60 testimonies that were added to the VHA on April 24, 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Another 185 indexed testimonies were added to the collection in April of this year.
Indexing is the process of a researcher watching each testimony and using USC Shoah Foundation’s indexing software to assign keywords to each minute of the testimony, so that it can be fully searchable in the Visual History Archive. This process must be complete before the testimonies are integrated into the Archive.
The Armenian testimonies were taken by filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian for use in the 17 documentaries he made about Armenians and the Armenian Genocide. In 2010, USC Shoah Foundation signed an agreement with Hagopian, his wife, and the Armenian Film Foundation to integrate the testimonies into the VHA. It is the largest collection of filmed interviews of survivors and witnesses of the Armenian Genocide.
The final testimonies to be indexed were challenging for Avedikyan because they included testimonies in Arabic, Greek, and Kurdish ”” three languages that weren’t previously in the VHA ”” as well as French, German, and Spanish. Avedikyan had Institute interns and staffers who spoke those languages (aside from Kurdish, which he had to get a written translation of) verbally translate the testimony for him while he indexed. This was more efficient than hiring other indexers to do just one or two testimonies.
“I think that was the best way to do it, and it was among the first times that we’ve done it this way,”
