Digitizing Hatred: Examining and Enhancing Understanding of Digital Collections on the history of the Second Ku Klux Klan and its Opponents

第二次三K党(约1915-1944年)及其盟友制作的报纸，以及他们的对手制作的出版物，是第一次世界大战后美国有组织的白人至上主义和本土主义复兴的关键来源。这些报纸对于理解20世纪20年代和30年代的快速社会和政治发展，以及不同的社区如何为确定作为美国人意味着什么而斗争至关重要。三K党报纸可以告诉我们，这个组织是如何说服数百万美国人支持他们的白人至上、好战的新教和爱国主义的计划的。与此同时，他们的反对者试图通过他们自己的印刷媒体来揭露这场复兴运动的意识形态，并警告他们的同胞，允许经常暴力和排外的美国主义表达是危险的。这些出版物中的一个重要系列已被汇编在由Revay Digital创建的数字收藏《记录20世纪20年代的白人至上及其对手》(DWSO)中。这一资源具有独特的潜力，可以刺激跨学科的研究议程，并促进公众对这一令人不安的美国历史领域的兴趣。然而，将这些材料数字化以使用户受益的过程，以及它们所包含的有争议的主题，仍然是一个巨大的挑战。这项名为“数字化仇恨：审查和加强对数字收藏的了解”的研究项目旨在分析学术和非学术受众如何互动和使用这一数字收藏，以帮助他们使用该平台。通过研讨会检查不同类型用户的需求，该项目将开发一套资源，帮助用户浏览集合并有效地将其用于自己的研究。虽然数字化倡议继续变得越来越受欢迎，以使全球受众能够获取关于过去的主要文件，但缺乏经验的研究人员使用这些倡议可能会在无法随时获得关于这种来源的背景和数字化进程时产生问题。数字资源尤其如此，如三K党制作的那些资源，目的是误导受众，并将他们招募到他们的种族主义政治活动中。除了改善DWSO收藏品的用户体验和研究潜力外，该项目还将提供一个亟需的分析和模型，说明如何谨慎、负责任地创建与“艰难的历史”相关的数字收藏品，考虑到人们对数字化的日益重视，这是一个紧迫的研究领域。该项目的研究将以不同的形式呈现，以接触和影响学术学者和更广泛的公众，他们将能够在计划在JSTOR上开放获取版本后使用完整的DWSO集合。为该藏品开发的数字资源将使所有用户受益，并帮助他们理解这些来源。以网上研讨会和关于项目进展情况的数字介绍等形式开展的外联活动将阐明数字化和情境化进程如何塑造这些收藏品。一篇或多篇同行评议的文章将强调这一过程及其在针对学术受众的研究中的挑战。2024年将举行一次关于数字化“艰难历史”的国际研讨会，这将为学者之间的知识交流和未来合作提供机会。最后，从这次研讨会产生的编辑集合将有助于这项研究的影响，并为进一步研究提供新的见解。

The newspapers produced by the Second Ku Klux Klan (c.1915-1944) and its allies, as well as the publications produced by their opponents are a key source about the resurgence of organized white supremacy and nativism in the United States in the period following the First World War. Such newspapers are critical for understanding the rapid social and political developments of the 1920s and 1930s and how different communities fought to determine what it meant to be an American. Klan newspapers can tell us how this organization worked to convince millions of Americans to support their programme of white supremacy, militant Protestantism and patriotism. Meanwhile, their opponents sought through their own print media to expose the ideology of this resurgent movement and to warn their fellow citizens of the dangers of enabling an often violent and exclusionary expression of Americanism. A significant series of these publications has been compiled in the 'Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920s' (DWSO) digital collection created by Reveal Digital. This resource has unique potential to stimulate interdisciplinary research agendas and facilitate public interest in this uncomfortable area of American history. Yet the process of digitizing these materials so they can benefit users, and the controversial subject matter they contain, remains a significant challenge. This research project, 'Digitizing Hatred: Examining and Enhancing Understanding of Digital Collections on the history of the Second Ku Klux Klan and its Opponents', aims to analyse how academic and non-academic audiences interact and employ this digital collection in order to develop resources to aid their use of the platform. By examining the needs of different kinds users through workshops, this project will develop a set of resources to help users navigate the collection and to effectively employ them in their own research. While digitizing initiatives continue to become ever more popular to allow global audiences access to primary documents about the past, their use by inexperienced researchers can create issues when context on such sources and the processes of digitization are not readily available. This is especially the case with digital sources such as those produced by the Klan that set out to misdirect audiences and to recruit them to their racist political campaigns. As well as improving the DWSO collection's user experience and research potential, this project will provide a much-needed analysis and model of how to prudently and responsibly create digital collections related to 'difficult history,' an urgent area of research considering the increasing emphasis on digitization. This project's research will be presented in different formats to reach and impact academic scholars and the wider public, who will be able to employ the full DWSO collection after it planned Open-access release on JSTOR. The digital resources developed for the collection will benefit all users and aid them with understanding these sources. Outreach activities in the form of webinars and digital presentations on the progress of the project will clarify how the process of digitization and contextualization has shaped the collection. One or more peer-reviewed article will highlight this process and its challenges in research directed at academic audiences. An international symposium in 2024 on digitizing 'difficult histories' will provide opportunities for knowledge exchange and future collaboration between scholars. Finally, an edited collection arising from this symposium will facilitate the impact of this research and provide new insights for further study.