Dr. Ethan Watrall will be delivering our keynote address:
Building the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive – A Practical Discussion of a Community Engaged Digital Heritage Project.
In 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. Nearly overnight, 120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and shipped off to incarceration and internment facilities, the majority of which were unfinished and located in the remote interior West. While there have been many projects that explore, preserve, provide access to, and contextualize this story through the lens of historic and archival materials, there have been comparatively fewer that do so through the lens of archaeology and tangible heritage.
Funded by the National Park Service, the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA) takes a unique approach by privileging the archaeological record. The project seeks to digitize, document, contextualize, and provide broad public access to tangible heritage that speaks uniquely to the lived experiences of Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent incarcerated and interned in the United States during World War II.
This talk will discuss the roots, design, and development of the project, with a particular eye towards exploring practical approaches to digitizing challenging materials, long term preservation and sustainability, community collaboration, and contextualizing difficult heritage. Ultimately, the goal of this talk is not just to discuss the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive, but to suggest a series of thoughtful and practical approaches to building deeply community engaged digital archaeology and heritage projects that could be adapted and adopted in wide variety of institutional, professional, and scholarly settings