Material uncertainty in computational workflow in the archives: Holocaust last writings beyond machine-readable extraction

Abstract This article examines how computational archival workflows transform fragile Holocaust last writings into machine-readable data, and what is lost in that transformation. It introduces the concept of material uncertainty: the condition of textual objects whose meaning cannot be separated from the damaged, improvised, or unstable material forms through which they survive. Drawing on Holocaust literary criticism, archival theory, material trauma studies, and debates over computation in cultural heritage, the article reconstructs a typical archival workflow, from image preprocessing, segmentation, and text recognition to post-processing, translation, metadata generation, and classification. It then executes this workflow on three Holocaust last-writing limit cases: Eva Schulzová’s illustrated poem “One Night in Terezín,” Eliezer Heiman’s inscribed clay tablets, and Sal Bramson’s cloth fragment. The workflow traces show that computational tools can enhance visibility, recover words, support translation, and create access, but also risk detaching textual content from the material conditions that make these objects evidentiary. Schulzová’s poem is reorganized as recoverable verbal text while its relation among image, line, and child authorship is flattened; Heiman’s clay resists extraction because depth, soot, and flaking occupy the same visual field; Bramson’s cloth shows how partial computational success may obscure relations among drawing, caption, textile, address, and clandestine transmission. The article argues that responsible workflows must be relation-preserving rather than extraction-driven, keeping uncertainty visible rather than resolving it into cleaner data.