Search

Archives can reinforce silences of marginalized communities, further erasing their stories and voices. This study aims to understand the contours of archival silences, focusing on experiences of Chinese people in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We are building a digital archival collection that centers Chinese peoples' voices around the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, an incident of racial violence that killed at least 28 Chinese people and displaced hundreds more. As we selected items, we wrote structured reflections to critically examine each item's content, source, presentation, arrangement and description in their original context, as well as any absences and silences that we encountered in the search and assessment process. Based on a praxis of radical empathy, ethics of care, and slow archives, we engaged with our positionalities, past experiences, professional training in Library and Information Sciences (LIS), and affective responses throughout the research process to reflect on how they shape our decisions and hesitations in item selection and contextualization. Three main themes emerged from a preliminary thematic analysis of our reflections: complexity of archival silences and silencing, challenges of inclusive representation, and problematizing and going beyond primary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry was forced to remove into internment camps in the United States during World War II. Densho Digital Repository curates a collection of oral histories, which mainly includes 904 filmed interviews about "Japanese American incarceration experience from those who lived it". This study uses web scraping techniques to collect 904 narrators' bio information and analyzes their demographic information, including race, age, and location. Nisei counts the most of the Japanese American narrators (78.82% of all narrators). 279 (39.35%) of narrators were minors (born between 1926 and 1942) in the year 1942, when the incarceration happened, with over half of them (58.78%) being teenagers (age between 12 and 17). The majority of narrators (82.09% of the total) are from the west coast, namely, Washington State, Oregon State, or California State. This study also constructs a scheme for incarceration oral history, based on which the incarceration historical texts can be manually or/and automatically processed. The annotation scheme includes seven categories: (1) pre‐war background to the incarceration; (2) government's decision to remove ethnic Japanese; (3) life after removal and during the incarceration; (4) military services; (5) returning of ethnic Japanese after WWII; (6) legal challenges; (7) redress movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increase in Anti‐Asian hate crimes in the United States in 2020, it is essential for information institutions to reflect on how they are confronting the oppression of Asian communities. Guided by the concept of radical empathy, we conducted an analysis on how historical Chinese students at the University of Illinois were documented and described in the university's archives. Relevant archival materials, descriptive metadata, and additional archives‐generated materials were examined to identify potential representation issues. The preliminary findings include: (1) Chinese students are mostly visible in registers and yearbooks, with some well‐known alumni also appearing in newspapers and correspondence; (2) Some culturally insensitive terms occasionally appeared in historical student newspaper articles; (3) Name variations related to Chinese "courtesy names" and hyphenations can lead to challenges in creating descriptive metadata and affect the discoverability of Chinese students in the archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]