Archiving Social Protest – Question 3

The Newberry is free and open to the public, and we will make the Chicago Protest Collection available according to our normal rules of access. The digital content is already available online both within and outside of the library. The physical materials are roughly sorted, but because of size and format it will be difficult to provide access to specific items in the reading room before they are fully identified in online inventories. During the coming year we plan to make them accessible, and also to digitize the materials and link the images to the online inventory. The availability of digital images will make it easier for researchers to narrow down what pieces they want to view physically.

Who is the Trump Protest Archive’s main audience? Stating that the audience of any digital project is “the general public” is just sloppy. So who’s the Trump Protest archive’s main audience? I admit that it’s a question I’m still pondering. Ideally, I’m hoping future researchers can find diverse ways to use the images and accompanying metadata. I’m confident that skilled digital humanists can find trends in themes across geographic boundaries or across time periods. A casual browser to the archive even now can explore how multifaceted the American and international resistance remains, centered as it is on diverse issues and using diverse tactics, from humor to emotional messaging.

People use our materials in a variety of ways, including for writing academic papers, books, and articles; creating documentary films; and designing college courses or art projects. Many university classes, both graduate and undergraduate, visit us to learn about the primary sources for particular topics that are relevant to our holdings. Some of the classes we have recently hosted include:

ight now, due to our limited resources, most of our collection is not easily usable outside of our organization. On a case-by-case basis, we do occasionally provide footage to partners, allies, and the media. Going forward, we are looking forward to building on our relationship with the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) at the University of Texas Libraries, where currently a small part of our collection is online and accessible for scholarly use.

Our initial hope was to preserve materials that bolstered a range of narratives about the Baltimore Uprising, and especially to counter mainstream media coverage. Television and internet news consumers were led to believe the entire city of Baltimore was on fire, every store was being looted, and masses of city residents were committing violent acts against police on April 19 and in the days that followed. Those of us who live in Baltimore know that the entire city was not ablaze in April and May of 2015. We know that not every neighborhood had cars set on fire. Not every Rite Aid was looted. We know that City School students were put in an untenable situation, in which transportation was shut down, leaving them stranded and confronted by police in riot gear. And we know firsthand that rumors at the time were rampant. […] It was necessary to collect documentation of the uprising that could reveal the problems with reported versions of events.