Legacies of Camp

This research focuses on identifying current barriers to accessing digital collections within archives and special collections, critically assessing technology solutions for closing the accessibility divide. In Fall 2021, a team of UROPs analyzed War Relocation Authority Form 26, an extensive (and potentially invasive) record of the 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent sent to American incarceration camps during World War II—the majority of whom were American citizens. With over two million data points, this dataset was released by the National Archives in the 1980s as a csv file. Largely unstudied for several decades, it is now readily accessible over the agency’s website. UROPS assessed how this potentially sensitive demographic information could be presented to public audiences and created a series of visualizations from this dataset.