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

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.