December 5, 2023: Archival Processing Showcase for INST604 – Introduction to Archives and Digital Curation

On December 5, 2023, graduate students at the University of Maryland iSchool showcased original and innovative work conducted  in the INST604 class (“Introduction to Archives & Digital Curation”). The class (designed to provide and introduction to the field through hands-on learning experiences with real records) concluded with a final project. This year, the entire 15-week class was articulated around the item-level processing of two historically significant series from the National Archives Records of the Department of Interior War Relocation Authority (WRA): (1) Series 51: Internal Security Case Reports, 1942-1946, and (2) Series 52: Internal Security Index Cards to the Case Reports, 1942-1946.

    • “Series 51 consists of narrative and form reports prepared by relocation center investigators, police officers, or directors of internal security, relating to cases of disorderly conduct, assault, theft, loss of property, and accidents at the centers. Each report includes the case number, the type of case or charge, the names and addresses of the persons involved, the time and place where the incident occurred, an account of the happening, and a statement of the actions taken by the investigating officer.”
    • “Series 52, although varying from center to center in the amount of information contained, consists of index cards that typically indicate for each case its number, type, the names of the principals, and a synopsis of the facts.”

The projects were guided by the sensitivity of the materials based on FOIA (b)(6) Personal Information, and FOIA (b)(7) Law Enforcement restrictions. Projects demonstrated archival processing on real records explorations in arrangement, description, linking, and access.

Presenters and final project topics included:

  1. Jacob Sheldon & Eleena Ghosh: Defiant Distillation: Alcohol Manufacturing at Manzanar
  2. Elinor Berger & Maya Pappas: Spatial Mapping of Police Reports at Manzanar
  3. Rebecca Lukachinski: Pulling People from Paper in Manzanar
  4. Dorothy Tang: Computational Archival Science (CAS) Approaches to Community Archives: San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin
  5. Emma Bentley & Jocelyn Wright: Case Classification and Temporal Analysis of Police Reports at Tule Lake
  6. Joshua Debell & Kirsten Elliott: Analysis of Police Report Case Names at Tule Lake
  7. Lottie Segal & Jessica Roshon: Reclassifying Abstract Police Reports from Tule Lake

Presentation details and recordings:

1. Defiant Distillation: Alcohol Manufacturing at Manzanar
Description: This project seeks to look closely at resistance in the Manzanar internment camp and bring the focus of the War Relocation Authority records back to the individuals and their storied lives. To do so, we focused in on a specific kind of resistance that showed up multiple times in the records and analyzed the connections between cases of alcohol manufacturing- a benign act that was highly criminalized in the camps because of its roots to Japanese traditions of community and connection.

After linking incident reports to incident cards across Series 51 and 52, we created a timeline of police reports concerning the production of alcohol by internees and created item-level metadata that includes national case numbers, people involved, role, case classification, and incident locations. In doing so, we were able to highlight the connections between cases and the significance of looking at these “smaller” levels of protest and resistance in the internment camps. The timeline visualization also includes photos from the National Archives and the Library of Congress (LOC), as well as newspaper articles from Densho.org and the LOC.
2. Spatial Mapping of Police Reports at Manzanar
Description: Our project focuses on incident location and report type for each of the police reports we examined in an effort to understand where incidents were most likely and less likely to occur. Using a map of Manzanar made available by the National Parks Service, we mapped out the incident location for each report, resulting in three separate maps, one for “crime” reports, one for “lost and found” reports, and the final for “casualty” reports. From our findings, we identified the warehouses as high in crime-related activity, many of these crimes including the confiscation of contraband. The lost and found cases were more likely to occur in or between residential spaces, as items lost were typically garments or other everyday items. Finally, we only had three casualty reports, all of which took place in residential areas.

3. Pulling People from Paper in Manzanar

Description: This project conducts a deep dive on an individual folder (Box 10, Folder 1) with a focus on reparative archival work in digital archives, and addressing silent stories: (1) creating person-focused archives/collections rather than document/organization focused), and (2) putting focus on the people; putting names to a history that has been systematically erased. The challenge is to find people in the documents which calls for a name-based finding aid. Choosing Folder 1, the study organizes people based on their role within the camp and their role within a police case.
4. Computational Archival Science (CAS) Approaches to Community Archives: San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin
Description: The purpose of this project is to apply digital curation skills and CAS tools to the church records of the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin. My goal is to develop some accessible and affordable practices that community archives can use in order to lessen volunteer work load and help volunteers catalog materials in an easier and more efficient manner. For the scope of this particular project, I created a potential model practice that is designed for the designated group’s accessibility, keeping in mind how the church plans to use their records. For the model, I utilized segmentation to separate the entities of a document, OCR to extract text from PDFs to more quickly pull metadata, NER and NLP to pull subject headings and facilitate future queries, and experimented with AI chat programs to produce descriptive text.
5. Case Classification and Temporal Analysis of Police Reports at Tule Lake
Description: We began our project by creating a tagging system to replace the existing “Type of Case” field, which we discovered was inconsistent in nature. We first used OpenRefine to cluster, then manually combined similar tags, and created new categories as necessary for those in the “Other” column, taking the total number of categories from 86 to 29. We then used IBM SPSS Statistics to run a series of temporal analyses on our data, looking for spikes in case numbers as they correspond to major events in Tule Lake’s history. While we hypothesized frequency of cases may be related to periods of unrest, we found instead that cases increased after martial law was lifted.
6. Analysis of Police Report Case Names at Tule Lake
Description: Our group worked on Box 18 of the items associated with the Tule Lake camp. While we were reorganizing the box’s contents into a series based on case file number we discovered that there was an inconsistency in how the cases were named. In some instances the case file would be titled A# while in others it was just the number. In light of this, our group decided to look at every case file where this occurred and create a timeline to compare the case files in an effort to uncover the possible reasons behind these different classification styles. After creating the timelines and comparing the casefiles that had similar titles we conclude that the camp officials may have simply been adjusting their reporting system still hence why the A# and # case files are in completely different years and deal with different cases.
7. Reclassifying Abstract Police Reports from Tule Lake
Description: Many of the police reports filed at Tule Lake were grouped under the classification of “Other,” which is a disservice for anyone attempting to sort through these cases for specific information. Because of this, we designed a new classification system specifically for the cases labeled “Other” so they may be more easily organized and understood.

-Co-authored by Richard Marciano & presenters