A thousand frayed puzzle pieces sit on a long table ahead of you, split by color into several quadrants but otherwise unconnected. Many are bent or folded, and still others remain at the outskirts of the table with colors that don’t match at all with the rest, you can’t even fathom where they fit in. And you’ve seen the general picture they’re all meant to finally arrange into but there’s a distinct chance you’re misremembering most of its fragments, that the big picture is gone to you.

Maybe you scrounge together and combine enough of your pieces to get away with a solid rendition of what the image is supposed to be, but now there are six million pieces ahead of you. How do you put that together?

This is one of the major shortcomings – not mistakes – of most audiovisual archives that supply the world with testimonies of the Holocaust and other genocides. They focus on the individual experience, fulfilling the moral imperative of restoring integrity to a survivor, but downplay the greater context of the survivor’s social setting.

“It promotes an anachronistically individualistic understanding of her identity and runs the danger of rewriting the survivor as a solitary hero in the viewer’s mind,” said Paris Papamichos Chronakis, a lecturer in Modern Greek History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Chronakis, whose research generally focuses on Eastern Mediterranean port-cities and their transition from the Ottoman Empire to successor nation-states, will present on the conceptual problems of serial logic and the interview formats of existing audiovisual archives in October at USC Shoah Foundation’s 2017 International Conference “Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies,” co-sponsored by the USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program.

He’ll also suggest a novel approach to the audiovisual archive through the digital reconstruction of social networks, allowing archives to move beyond serial logic and begin to present information in a new, more historically faithful and anthropological understanding of the Holocaust survivor as a networked self.

“Things could look very different if one took the social relation a survivor forged as the archive’s organizing unit,” Chronakis said. “How did a prisoner establish contact with his fellow inmates? What were the social bases of trust and the cultural meanings of relatedness? What types of social networks were formed and how interconnected were they? In short – how does sociality work in extreme conditions?”

The two-day conference, which will be held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, invited scholars from across the globe to converge and discuss the relationship between digital methodologies, practices, ethics and the nature of contemporary Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Chronakis hopes to supply the scholars that attend the conference, as well as other historians, a tool he’s developed to grapple with all of his questions and to exist as an example of a newly organized archive, which he will explain at the conference.

“Professor Giorgos Antoniou from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and I are currently directing ‘Bonds of Survival,’ a digital humanities project to visualize the social networks of Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors from the city of Thessaloniki in the concentration camps,” Chronakis said. “By digitally documenting the forms and structures of relatedness, our paper argues that historians can better understand how Holocaust survivors attempted to reconstruct a social universe in the camps and navigate within it under extremely adverse circumstances.”

The conference will feature over a dozen scholars presenting on a variety of subjects, from the netnography of digital autobiographical documentary to the capacities of geographic information systems for analyzing Holocaust spaces to the usefulness of augmented reality technologies in sharing the memories of the places of genocides.

In an initial call for papers, USC Shoah Foundation asked academics to investigate the ways in which digital tools and methods, new media and information technologies can help us to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the Holocaust and Genocide Studies by raising new questions, improving our understandings, deepening our analyses, widening our fields of view and pioneering new approaches.

That’s just what Chronakis hopes to do with his challenges to the existing archival system, his presentation highlighting the merits of a relational and integrational approach based on cataloguing and spatializing all documented social interactions occurring as much among Salonican Sephardic Jews and between them and other Jews and gentiles.

“My presentation and the larger project it forms is part of an attempt at once to rethink the very logic of the digital Holocaust archive, its ingrained limitations and analytical blind spots, and also suggests a novel, digitally informed way to manage the wealth of information audiovisual testimonies offer on social relations inside and outside the camps,” Chronakis said.

He expects that the conference will provide the ideal forum to discuss the merits and drawbacks of his database, and inform an article-length piece on the benefits of social network analysis for Holocaust Studies.

“I view the conference primarily as an invitation to learn from others, challenged by iconoclastic approaches and, hence, question my own certainties,” Chronakis said.  “I would like to see my presentation be part of broader, overlapping conversations regarding the hidden taxonomies of genocide audiovisual archives; the need to redress the still largely Ashkenazi-centered Holocaust narrative and deprovincialize the Sephardic Jewish Holocaust experience; and the importance of social network analysis for genocide research.”

Chronakis has worked in historical studies for many years. Of late, he’s slowly been turning his dissertation into a book that retells the history of an elusive entity – the multiethnic Levantine bourgeoisie as it made, unmade and remade itself as well as the imperial and post-imperial worlds of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first third of the twentieth century. Since June, he’s worked with Antoniou with help from a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation on his database and a course around it that will bring students from Thessaloniki and Chicago together online.

The author of many scholarly works has interacted with USC Shoah Foundation throughout his studies, since the mid-2000s.

“Friends and mentors who had worked as interviewers for the Institute alerted me to the value of the Visual History Archive at a time when oral history and Holocaust Studies were still a peripheral field of academic inquiry in Greece,” Chronakis said. “I first used the VHA myself back in 2007…Watching testimonies, I was amazed with the value of information one could easily glean on prewar Jewish life in Salonica and began to imagine the very different research projects and areas of historical research it can serve.”

In 2011, the VHA served as a model for his team in Greece to design a Database of Greek Jewish Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies, for which Institute staff allowed Chronakis’ team time, advice and access to the VHA’s taxonomies.

That same year, Chronakis collaborated with the Institute and set up access to the VHA at the Aristotle university of Thessaloniki. Access allowed Chronakis to study the Jews of Salonica, whose memory essentially perished in its entirety during World War II.

“It has become a platitude, yet one worth repeating, that over the years USC Shoah Foundation has become a beehive in bringing together scholars from different fields and regions,” Chronakis said. “Equally important is the fact that the Institute has readily lent itself to scholarly scrutiny and academic inquiry. As a historian, I remain grateful to USC Shoah Foundation for the scholarly and political objectives it serves.”