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UID:pretalx-spathum24-YBM8PQ@pretalx.com
DTSTART;TZID=CET:20240925T160000
DTEND;TZID=CET:20240925T163000
DESCRIPTION:In World War 2\, the Nazi regime systematically persecuted and 
 murdered millions of Jews and other targeted groups – an event commonly 
 referred to as the Holocaust. While previous literature has explored what 
 – drawing on Agnew and Duncan – the locations and locales of the Holoc
 aust\, less has been written on sense of place.  One key source for unders
 tanding victims’ sense of place is post-war interviews with survivors. T
 hese provide valuable sources of historical and cultural knowledge\, as we
 ll as emotional and psychological insight into the human condition under e
 xtreme circumstances. Of particular interest to us\, given the focus on se
 nse of place\, survivors’ narratives contain references to the emotions 
 experienced when describing memories of people\, places\, and events. \nOn
 e aspect that can be explored in Holocaust survivors' testimonies is the s
 patial and temporal dimensions of the emotions expressed about people\, pl
 aces\, and events\, otherwise known as the geography of emotion. As Guy Mi
 ron signals in the case of German Jews\, individuals experienced Nazi spat
 ial control "both as a feeling and as a physical reality". Just as spatial
  experiences had an emotional dimension\, so too did emotions have a spati
 ality or geography. Emotional geography is a concept that helps us underst
 and how people feel about and react to\, their environment\, and how their
  environment influences their identity and memory. It also allows us to ex
 amine the interplay of different emotional experiences\, e.g. fear\, anger
 \, surprise\, sadness\, disgust\, and even joy which were originally propo
 sed by Ekman and Friesen. We hypothesise that the analysis of these combin
 ations of emotions expressed by multiple individuals at different places a
 nd times and in different situations during the Holocaust provides a much 
 richer understanding of the geography and physicality of these emotions. \
 nWith this work\, we aim to develop a computational framework for understa
 nding the emotional landscapes of a textual narrative in a more nuanced fo
 rm beyond the classification into positive and negative sentiments. We app
 lied our method to a sample of Holocaust survivors' testimonies with a foc
 us on Ekman and Friesen’s 6 emotion classes.  We approached this study b
 y posing the following fundamental research questions:\n•	Can we use nat
 ural language processing techniques - possibly leveraging large language m
 odels - to effectively extract and analyse expressions of emotions in Holo
 caust testimonies?\n•	If so\, how can we quantitatively and qualitativel
 y represent the interplay of different emotions in a survivor’s testimon
 y?\n•	How does the expression of each of the emotions change across the 
 narrative sequence of each testimony?\n•	Do different spatiotemporal ele
 ments (toponyms\, geographical features\, events\, date and time\, etc.) p
 articularly relate or interact with specific emotions in any way?\nFor thi
 s work\, we will adapt an extraction pipeline that is a version of the fra
 mework originally proposed by Ezeani et al.\,  for extracting place names\
 , and geographical feature nouns from text through named entity recognitio
 n for the Lake District corpora in the United Kingdom. The framework inclu
 des processes for fine-tuning an off-the-shelf named-entity recogniser. Th
 e fine-tuned model is subsequently applied to similar texts to perform sur
 face-level extraction of spatial elements and even sentiment-bearing words
  for basic sentiment analysis. This pipeline will be improved by leveragin
 g large language models for emotion classification as well as modification
 s appropriate to Holocaust testimonies.
DTSTAMP:20260410T093725Z
LOCATION:MG1/02.05
SUMMARY:The Geography of Emotions in the Holocaust Survivor’s Testimonies
  - Dr. Ignatius Ezeani
URL:https://pretalx.com/spathum24/talk/YBM8PQ/
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