jake kara, software engineer ‣ Visual Search ░

Visual Search

The Visual Search is a project for the Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies that visualizes the collection’s metadata. I was the primary developer on this app.

The VisualSearch interface

Because the metadata was relatively small, and we wanted the app to be as inexpensive as possible to host, it is built with no backend, loading all of the data as flat JSON files.

Fortunoff Video Archive Director Stephen Naron co-wrote an article describing the design philosophy behind the tool for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) Document Blog.

Stephen and I also co-presented “Striking a Balance Between Ethics and Access: The FortunoffArchive’s Approach to the Digital Humanities” at Prague Visual History and Digital HumanitiesConference (PraViDCo) 2020 (program) (compendium of papers), which focused in part on the development of Visual Search.