Dr. Watrall speaks on "Building the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive - A Practical Discussion of a Community Engaged Digital Heritage Project"

Friday Forum Lecture Series

Building the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive - A Practical Discussion of a Community Engaged Digital Heritage Project

Dr. Ethan Watrall

Associate Professor
Anthropology Director
Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative Director
Digital Heritage Imaging & Innovation Lab
Curator of Archaeology, MSU
Museum Michigan State University

Friday, March 1 3:30 pm
Howe-Russell E130
A reception to be followed

Abstract of Talk

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.

Biography for Dr. Ethan Watrall

An anthropological archaeologist who has worked in Canada, the United States, Egypt, and the Sudan, Ethan Watrall is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University. He also serves as the Director of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, Director of the Digital Heritage Innovation Lab, and Curator of Archaeology at the Michigan State University Museum. In 2022 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, the oldest learned scholarly society focusing on heritage and archaeology.

Over the past 15 years, he has directed, co-directed, or contributed to numerous privately and publicly funded digital heritage and archaeology projects, including the Institute for Digital Archaeological Method & Practice, The Archive of Malian Photography, the Archaeological Resource Cataloging System, and Enslaved: People of the Historical Slave Trade. He is currently Co-Director of the National Park Service funded Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA).

His scholarship focuses on the application of digital methods and computational approaches within archaeology and heritage, with a particular focus on (1) public and community engaged digital heritage and archaeology; and (2) digital documentation and preservation of tangible heritage and archaeological materials. The thematic thread that binds these domains together is one of preservation and access – leveraging digital methods and computational approaches to preserve and provide access to archaeological and heritage materials, collections, knowledge, and data in order to facilitate research, advance community engagement, fuel interpretation, and democratize understanding and appreciation of the past.

Two Edited volumes are available from the LSU Library:

For more information please contact Heather McKillop, Dept. of Geography & Anthropology, hmckill@lsu.edu