Technology for social good - The UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum
- Summary:
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As her second example of technology being used as a force for social good, Cath Everett looks at the work of the UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum.
The UK’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum faced a significant but unusual challenge: it wanted to use technology, not to do something differently as is usually the case, but to recreate a powerful experience that already existed.
The problem was that the 40 or so Holocaust survivors who come regularly to volunteer at the Centre in Newark-on-Trent - and in many instances travel some distance to do so – are ageing.
Each day, two of them give a presentation and answer questions about their experiences for the 25,000 children who visit every year, but numbers are starting to dwindle as the volunteers grow increasingly infirm or pass away.
As a result, the Centre decided to get around the issue by developing life-size, interactive, 3D projections of 10 of its survivors to supplement existing technology such as kiosks, which provide short comments and snippets of a story rather than in-depth testimony. Sarah Coward, the Centre’s development director, explains:
There’s a lot of plain film that has captured people’s experience, but it doesn’t necessarily capture the answers that the children care about. It’s that interaction and being able to draw out things of interest that’s going to be lost so we looked at how digital technology could be used to preserve the experience.
Bright White, an interpretive design agency specialising in museums and heritage developed and project-managed the initiative, while Professor Eunice Ma, an expert in games and natural language processing at the University of Huddersfield, came up with a methodology for linking questions and answers and matching them seamlessly.
The questions themselves, meanwhile, were devised and prioritised by members of the Centre’s educational team, which worked for three months in advance of every filming session to get everything ready. Each participant was asked between 850 and 1,400 questions and their responses and more general testimony were filmed in ultra-high-definition 3D video over an average period of five days.
The system also includes speech recognition, natural language processing and replay technology as well as real-time graphics to “smooth the transition between answers”. Coward says:
We don’t have enormous funds, but this project was driven by a genuine problem rather than ‘let’s do something digital and see if it works’. It made us think thoroughly about why we needed it, what we needed to do and what results we were expecting it to bring. That enabled us to take risks. Innovation driven by genuine problems is really important, otherwise you might not get the result you need and create something that no one really wanted in the first place.
In her final use case in this series, Cath Everett looks at Disrupt Disability.