maggie, however, was also the only one to get married and the only one to have children. >> this was a preview of american history tv's weekly half-hour series, "american artifacts." tune in to c-span3 on sunday at 8:00 a.m., 7:00 p.m. or 10:00 p.m. eastern to see the entire program. coming up next, we talk with tom ikeda of the japanese-american legacy project and jasmine alinder of the march on washington at the american historians meeting in milwaukee. they discuss the historical value of online, oral and digital history collections. this is about 30 minutes. american history tv is at the organization of american historians annual meeting in milwaukee, and we are going to focus next on a discussion on oral histories and digital histories with tom ikeda, who is the executive director of the japanese-american legacy

project, the densho project, which some of our history tv viewers are familiar with, and jasmine alinder from the university of wisconsin. tom ikeda, what is the densho project that you've been working on? >> so it's a community nonprofit based in seattle where we go out and collect the stories of japanese americans who were incarcerated during world war ii, so the 120,000 people who were in the camps. what we do are the survivors from that, we go out and do a videotaped interview and then share those interviews on the web. >> how many of these interviews have you done? >> we've now done about 650, and we'll probably add another 50 or so this year. >> jasmine alinder, you're working on an oral history project, as well, the march on milwaukee civil history rights project. what can you tell us about that? >> so, the march on milwaukee several history rights project is a digital archive, it's an online archive of sources relating to mostly the struggle for open housing and school desegregation in 1960s milwaukee.

it includes oral histories, but it also includes text documents, photographs and video footage, news footage from a local tv station at the time. >> what do you find the biggest challenge is? because your document, both of you are relatively recent history. we're talking in the case of the civil rights into the '60s -- '50s and '60s in the case of the japanese heritage project, the 1940s or so. what are the biggest challenges in terms of finding original source material? >> well, we had at my university, university of wisconsin, milwaukee, we had a lot of the documents already in our physical archives. so the challenge was to make them more accessible and to give them a kind of a context so that students in milwaukee in particular but beyond could learn more about their city and its history. >> tom ikeda, how about you? >> in the same way. there are actually quite a bit of materials, documents. i mean, you have to realize the government did this action

against japanese-americans, and the government actually kept a lot of records, and so in places like the national archives or photographs, documents, in many of these we have scanned and put them on our website, also, perhaps the hardest part was to, especially initially, was to convince japanese-americans to be interviewed for this. there was a reluctance to share their story because, you know, some still felt shame, even though they did nothing wrong. they felt something must have been wrong for them to be put in camps, and so it took a while to just encourage them to actually be interviewed. that was actually the toughest part. >> why are oral histories becoming more popular? we see them more often these days. we certainly on american history tv air a number of different oral histories. why are they becoming more and more popular? why are they more important these days? >> i think one reason, and then you can add to it, is that if you want to get at the experiences of everyday people, those often aren't recorded in more traditional sources that

end up in archives. so if you want to do a history of the japanese-american incarceration from the perspective of someone who was incarcerated, or if you want to do the history of milwaukee civil rights from somebody who was on the ground marching, oral histories are a really good way to get those individual stories. >> yeah, and -- and in addition to that -- i agree totally with jasmine, but also the advent of some of the technology makes it easier also. i mean, things like digital video, digital audio, you know, computers to organize things. it actually makes it much easier to -- to pull these together and then share them, whereas before i think more in the '60s and '70s, the oral histories were done, but oftentimes just a researcher with tapes, and oftentimes they would be put in archives and no one would know about this. now i think people are seeing oral histories more. they are still being done but they are more visible, too. >> when you talk to people in doing these histories, do you find that most of them haven't written down their experiences

at some point? most of them don't keep diaries or journals? >> yeah. in our case, most people do not. i mean, they -- when they tell us their story, it's -- it's just, you know, from their memories. most of them have not written this down or in some cases not even told other people about this. >> i think one thing also that you pointed out that's important for the story that densho is telling is what a healing experience it is often for the people that you're interviewing. >> i'm curious if that's your case, too, if you see some of that. >> i think initially. so there's two sides. one is there are former activists who are so happy that someone is interested in their story and know that this is an important history and has so much relevance for today, so that they have the opportunity to tell that story is something on the one and they are kind of surprised and then very excited to share. >> yeah. and in our case, sometimes it's someone who has never told a

story, and it's been bottled up. i mean, it's something that they've i think wanted to share but felt like they couldn't, and when they finally do have that release where they are able to tell that story and share it, it is like a huge weight off their -- off the shoulders. >> do you think there's a responsibility on the part of historians to -- to cull a lot of these oral histories or obviously other -- other sources to images, articles, to cull these, but particularly with oral histories into a narrative and to say here's what we learned over the course of these 16 years or whatever of doing this project? here's our take on this? >> for me -- i'll answer, and then -- and then you can disagree with me. you know, i think having both is really powerful. i think for us to first go out and collect these stories and make them available in their

complete form is -- is really important, but then i think having a layer of interpretation is also valuable. and i think that interpretation from different perspectives. i think the one thing i've learned -- i mean, my background was more the sciences and engineering. >> yeah. >> where things tend to be a little more black and white. history is just -- it's -- there's so many different perspectives. there is no right answer, and that's what i think i've learned, so even in an interpretation i've realized is one person's interpretation and not necessarily the truth, and i think -- but having those primary sources there available with many people to look at and interpret i think is a nice balance. >> yeah. i think some of -- so for both of us, the oral histories that we include on our sites we have full transcripts for. you can search through them. can you move around in the interview. mine are just audio. you have video.

and one thing that's interesting to me is we're working with a group of high school students right now, and they have been using some of the materials on the march on milwaukee site, and they are creating an exhibition, which actually opens tonight, based on that history, it's their interpretation. and the oral histories have been really compelling for them, so much so that they have wanted to follow up and do their own interviews with some of the subjects, too. so that's been interesting to me because it's not just that they are learning a new story through, you know, listening to this interview, but they want to have that interaction and get the story themselves. >> i believe we've talked about this in an earlier conversation about what you -- where you ultimately would like to see this reside in terms of your -- your project. where do you want to see this reside so people can access it years from now? >> that's a really good question. i mean, a lot of the point of doing digital history and digital projects is, again this, idea of accessibility, but

putting something up on the web doesn't make it inherently accessible, right? >> mm-hmm. >> so the challenge i think right now -- and densho and tom are excellent examples of this -- is how you forge relationships with students, k-12 students, with teachers, with community members, to make these materials alive for them and to make them want to use them, learn more about this history, and then become owners of it, you know, feel some kind of ownership for this past and responsibility to it. >> let's talk about the technology a little bit. you're doing your interviews in digital video format. i assume both of you are because that's where the technology is now. is there any concern that over the -- over the course of however many years that format either is no longer -- is obsolete or it degrades as in microfilm or paper? or what are your concerns about preserving what you've recorded? >> well, for us, we -- we just plan -- i mean, already from the

time we started, our digital format's probably changed three times, you know, three times in terms of three different versions of format. so we constantly need to refresh our materials. you know, the one nice thing about digital, you know, we're restoring bits, and so the degradation isn't as much as the analog if you go, from, you know, reproduce a tape from a tape. so currently every seven years we refresh our interviews. and then maybe just in terms of refreshing a tape or an archival version. but oftentimes it's looking at the actual file format where now we have to do something. we have to make sure that it can be played in the future, so we're constantly thinking about that. >> tell us about technology with the civil rights project. >> well, for some people, digitizing is kind of a form of preservation, so we were actually dealing with existing interviews that had been conducted in the '90s and actually as late as 2006, but they were done on cassette tape

originally. >> audiotape? >> yeah, analog, cassette audio tape, things that if i showed a 15-year-old now they would have no idea what they were looking at. so we had to digitize those, and so by doing that we were in a sense preserving it because the sound was already degrading on those tapes. so for us it was a way to preserve interviews that were already starting to falter. >> what are some of the more interesting revelations that you found in the course of putting together this history on civil rights in milwaukee? >> i think one of the interesting revelations, for me this project wouldn't have happened if it wasn't something that local activists wanted to see happen, so the impetus really came from them. they didn't immediately think, we want this to be a digital history online. they thought, you know, let's -- >> we want to tell our story. >> we want to tell our story,

exactly, and what are the different ways. some wrote poetry. some wrote a play. we had an exhibition. a lot of different kinds of formats. and then knowing the kind of archival sources we had from my perspective as a historian i thought there's another piece here that we need to get out. and that's the sort of archival historical side of the story. >> tom ikeda, what are some of the more interesting or more memorable things out of this densho project for you? >> so, my training wasn't in the social sciences, so it was more in the technology area, so i didn't have this appreciation until i actually started doing the stories and collecting them where as i got deeper and deeper into the japanese-american story, i started realizing that in american history we have these patterns, and rather than just thinking about just the japanese-american story as maybe a silo of information, i realized that they are actually connected to the other stories. i mean, we're at this conference, and actually i was

on a panel, and the speaker right after me talked about the braceros, you know, the mexicans who were brought into the united states on kind of this work program. and what struck me was the date they started coming in was 1942, which was the same year that japanese-americans were removed from the west coast as laborers. and i realized these are all interconnected, and that was kind of the interesting thing to me. so going forward with the project i realized we have to do a better job of connecting the japanese-american stories with the stories of other communities, because that's the power, i think, in terms of what we can do. >> do you think you may have some interest in doing that? have you talked to, for example, people who were guards at some of the internment camps? >> yeah, no, we have. we started doing that. and we're also even beyond just the japanese-american, you know, world war ii experience. >> yeah. >> we're talking with, like, the arab-american community or the muslim community in terms of

what happened post 9/11, and hearing their stories and you can start seeing these similarities in terms of, you know, if you're an arab-american and you sort of look like the enemy, how do you show your loyalty to the united states? mean, do you become ultra patriotic? do you stand up for rights if, you know, people start targeting you? i mean, it's a very complicated issue that japanese-americans had to navigate during world war ii that other groups have to navigate in the future? for us to understand that and share that is a very powerful thing you. >> you mentioned high school students are using your project to create some of their own work. what about the students that you teach at the university of wisconsin in history courses? just more broadly, did they -- do students these days have an expectation that information, whether it's about civil rights or world war ii or whatever, is easily available to them, in other words, that they can access -- there should be something digital and online and available and it should be easily accessible? >> i would say generally yes.

students have that expectation, so it's always really important from my perspective to actually take them into the library and to walk to a stack and pull out a book and make them do exercises where they are look looking at microfilm, you know, however ancient that might seem. so, yeah, they do expect that. but there -- the comment that i get from students when they start to learn about civil rights history in their city is, why didn't i know about this before? they -- on the one hand they are a little bit angry. they feel like this is relevant to them. this makes -- helps them make sense of their world. and it's something that they feel like has really been left out of the history that they have been told. >> how has the teaching of history, particularly civil rights history, been changed by what you've learned in your project? >> well, i mean, it's definitely made it a lot easier to do.

the students that we're working with now -- i mean, you know, tom talking about the kind of ripple effect. >> yeah. >> the connections that he's making to other histories and how they are all related, so i'm thinking -- so that's really important, too. but what i am really focusing on now is the sort of one-on-one encounters, so not the ripple effect, but how can these stories have impact and make meaning for individual students today? you know, milwaukee still has a lot of these same problems, problems of poverty and segregation, we're not graduating enough kids from high school. and these kids will come together to work on this project, you know, learning about the civil rights past. they have this appreciation for leaders that they see who were struggling for human rights in milwaukee in the 1960s, and they are very consciously deciding we want to be leaders, too. and that kind of investment is i think something that could

really benefit the city and these individual students as well, so it works both ways. >> tom ikeda, are you seeing your resource, your project being used by history professors, high school teachers as sort of a starting point for research? >> yeah, especially in high schools. you know, more and more. i mean, back in seattle right now there is a high school, public high school, that the 11th grade classes, you know, they are each taking one story from the densho archive and studying it. and i help by selecting a range because i wanted them to get different perspectives, and what they are doing is they are studying it. they are going to do a report on that person. and then they are going to compare, like the response of how a person should show their loyalty when -- when the government, you know, sort of targets them. and so there's a case where not only are they just using it, but they are having to use their critical thinking skills in

terms of, okay, different perspectives, different reactions, and that's the part that i love. i mean, oftentimes when we think about digital archives, i think some people think of it as a superficial thing. oh, that's quick. i can go online, do a search, get it, and then go away. but what i'm also seeing is times when people can actually go deeper, and as they learn and jasmine mentioned in terms of students wanting to do oral histories, we're seeing that same phenomena where, as students learn more about history and primary sources, not only do they have better appreciation they want to do their own oral history and they want to do that and that's really exciting. so i think then we're seeing this depth of understanding that i think is really critical in terms of what it means to be a citizen in the united states. it's complicated trying to figure these things out. >> that's one of my next questions. have you had -- you mentioned individual students. have you had organizations come to you and say, you've done

this, what can we learn from this? we'd like to start a project on this. >> i do. probably every month we get two or three e-mails or phone calls about, so how did we do this? and so in the future we see ourselves helping each other. i think one of the ideals that we had when we first started densho, in the only did we want to use it for the japanese-american community, but we wanted to create methods, a platform that we could share with other communities, especially those communities whose stories have not been really heard or preserved in the past, and so that's what we really want to do in terms of, you know, the project, so -- >> do you find that -- jasmine mentioned earlier that a number of the civil rights activists were happy to have their story finally told. is that the common experience with folks who were in internment camps? >> i think it's more of a relief. i think in general the japanese-americans i've

interviewed, i mean, they still -- there's still maybe a reluctance to do it, and when they do it, i think they feel better. but i think they do it out of a sense of if they don't speak out now their story won't be remembered, and here's an remembered, and here's an opportunity to share this with the rest of the country for generations. and so i think it's more that feeling. i don't really see this -- this sense of really wanting to do this, but they are willing to do it. >> there is also a generational thing because you're talking about students who want to do oral history. so maybe the folks you're talking to, a little bit younger than world war ii folks, that are a little more comfortable in being on a camera or in front of a microphone and sharing their story. >> i definitely get the sense that there's a desire to pass the torch, it's a term that some of the activists that we have interviewed have used, and actually, one of the activists

who really brought my attention to civil rights history in milwaukee said that she had been attending funerals of friends of hers that were starting to pass away. she felt that their activism wasn't being acknowledged, wasn't being remembered, and was really afraid their children, grandchildren didn't know about this side of their relatives' past. so it was -- it sounded like a real deep concern that this history is going to die when those people who are most closely involve die. >> tommy, do you speak to some of the -- yours are more contemporaries of the sons and grandsons and people more affected by that. >> do i talk to them in terms of interviewing them? >> yes. >> we do. i mean, not as many because our priority is more for the elders

who are more like in their 80s and 90s, but what's also interesting is looking at the issue of -- what was the impact on the children of people who were in the camps? i'll take myself as an example, so i was born in 1956, baby boomer. you know, my parents were in camp. you know, they were resettled in seattle and they're getting their lives together. then they start having children. and to give you some background my dad was a really good judo expert, took japanese. he was raised in the japanese-american community knowing his japanese culture. when i was raised in the '50s and '60s, i was brought up on basketball, baseball, football,

no japanese and there was this distance from my japanese background and it's interesting to interview people my age and that's a very common thing. one of the things we found out that it was very common before the war for people -- when kids were born to have a japanese middle name. if you were born in the '50s hardly any japanese-americans have a japanese middle name. mine is kevin and later on in terms of civil right, 1960 on, you start seeing the reemergence of japanese middle names. there was this sense of coming back in terms of more ethnic pride. it was kind of interesting. it had a lot to do with the civil rights movements. >> studies programs, redress became a big issue, and i have to give a plug because i love the project and i used it both in my teaching and the researcher. the oral histories are fabulous.

i've also used a lot of the newspaper. they have a lot of camp newspapers archived. >> where were those kept before you got to them? was it in the national archives? >> some of them were. the ones we really like to make available are the originals. many of those were in the basements of people who were in the camps. they would have the full set of, like, newspapers from the camp, and there would be a year's worth. they're yellow and i just love them. >> is that a daily newspaper there? >> there were, i think, about four times a week or so. depending on the camps, some were almost daily. some were weekly. it depended on which camp you were from. >> there would be supplements and bulletins. >> you mentioned tv footage, and i know in the notes that you use the archives from the news film from wtmj in milwaukee. when you went to look at that footage was that in good shape? was it well organized and how easy was it to get access to

that from the great tv station? >> so the tv stations donated it to the archives. >> and the original footage? >> yes. the original footage. that all had to be digitized too. it's this analog to digital kind of transfer. and it was decades and decades. so it was covering all sorts of, you know, local milwaukee history. so it was complicated to work with, but once it was processed and digitized and logged, i have to say in terms of the power and the immediacy of that kind of primary source, there's nothing that can really top it. >> so you have the original sources then. you digitized those. what happens to that original old news film, that 16-millimeter film? >> those are all archived at the university. >> at the university of wisconsin. >> yes. reels and reels and reels of it. >> tommy, i'll ask you about the original source material that you have in the project. where do you hope that

ultimately that will reside? >> a lot of physical stuff -- we're on hold. we actually partner with museums and others so that they hold the physical our if i facts. we do this frankly for a cost reason. to actually archive, photographs, documents, artifacts and to try to keep it in perpetuity is a very expensive process. as a community non-profit, for us to digitize and just deal with the digital times is much less expensive and much easier to sustain. so that's kind of the model we have. when i look at the operating costs of our operation versus a museum that has all these artifact, we're like a tenth. yet, i think we have a similar, or in some cases, larger reach than the museums because of the internet. >> in the last couple minutes,

i'll wrap up by asking you, which are some of the challenges ahead, both in your particular project and in the area of preserving digital records and oral histories? >> for me, i think the challenge, again, is to keep this material relevant and to make it alive and to make these sources living and present and to make sure that there are students willing to use them and they probably want to go into the physical archive and the whole entire array of sources and we're doing this, i think, because we believe the history is relevant to the present and that students now can learn a lot from it and hopefully make a better future. >> tommy. >> i agree with jasmine. we do this work to preserve it, to make it on want internet. jasmine said it earlier and just because it's out there, doesn't

mean that needs access. so making these materials alive, used. and thing we always are concerned about is someone maybe taking something from our work or our archive and taking it out of context. so i think that's, again, important to have communities who are using it because i think communities help self-police those kind of activities. so if someone used a densho photograph inappropriately or something, generally the community finds out. they police that. >> i wanted to ask about the community lastly. i meant to ask this earlier. the effect of social media. facebook and twitter and things like that. are you using that in your projects? >> i probably should be using it more. the students in their exhibition that opens tonight they've embedded qr codes so people can go on with their mobile phones and click on them and then they'll be led to oral histories on the website or other

documents that the students think are relevant. so it's a actually pretty important thing that we need to work with more. >> in the same way we recognize that and we're revamping our technology, to make it better we use social media. not only social media, but smartphones and mobile devices so the design shows up well and they can share it easily with something like facebook and things like that, so, yea, we're very much thinking of social media. >> tommy, with the executive director of the japanese-american legacy project and jasmine, from the university of wisconsin inman sop. thank you for being with us on american history tv. >> thank you. can congress on break this week, we're featuring some of the american history tv's weekend programs in primetime here on c-span 3. on monday night, we'll look at the legacy of watergate on the 40th anniversary of the break-in beginning at 8 p.m. eastern, tour the watergate exhibi