Gabor Toth, Ph.D.
Center Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
2017-2018

Gabor Toth was a postdoctoral associate who has recently completed a dual fellowship at the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Tóth earned his BA in Italian Literature and Language from Eötvös Lórand Science University, Budapest, his MA in Medieval Studies from Central European University, Budapest, and his PhD in History from the University of Oxford. His doctoral dissertation, entitled “Thinking and Knowledge in Renaissance Florence: a Computer Assisted Analysis of the Diaries and Commonplace Books of Giovanni Rucellai and his Contemporaries,” built on archival research of the knowledge system in early modern Italy to argue “that the transition from oral to literate culture produced quantitative and qualitative changes in human thought.” Tóth has won many awards, including a 2015 Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Center for Humanities and the 2016 Gerda Henkel Fellowship in Digital History at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He has worked and is fluent in Hungarian, Italian, French and German. His work has been published in journals including Oxford’s Journal of Literary and Linguistic Computing, the CEU Annual of Medieval Studies and Fondazione Cini’s Studi VeneziTóth is also the founder and co-organizer of Hi-Cor, an interdisciplinary research group of historians and computational/corpus linguists at Oxford University. 

 

During his time at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Toth worked on a monograph about the commonalities and differences underlying survivors’ experiences of Nazi persecution. His analysis for the monograph is facilitated by the development of an exploratory tool, a digital transcript reader, produced by Tóth in conjunction with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and Yale Library’s Digital Humanities Lab. The transcript reader aims to “enhance the exploration of hidden connections between testimonies, overlapping and unique survivor experiences, and suppressed memories” in survivor interviews from the Visual History Archive, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.