Densho Digital Repository - Tom Ikeda Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-484-20)

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BY: And then more generally, and boy, Tom, excuse my pronunciations all along the way. But more generally, so what do the Yonseis -- is that how you say it?

TI: Yeah, Yonsei.

BY: What do they think of Densho?

TI: Oh, I think they're... I mean, again, thinking of my children, they're so appreciative. That if we had not captured the stories that we did, a lot of them would be lost to that generation.

BY: Do you think, have you ever encountered any of their friends or contemporaries who don't get it, don't get Densho? "That's so long ago?"

TI: Not really. What's interesting, and in some ways, the Yonseis get it more than the Niseis and my generation. Because to them, of course, history and this information should be captured and online, it should be digital, it should be searchable, it should be connected. That, yeah, to them, whereas I talk to people, and say, "Oh, yeah, it's so cool, this technology thing," a Yonsei or millennial would say, "Well, why wouldn't you do it that way? I mean, if you don't do it, it's like it's not going to get used." And so what we do and how we do it, I think the younger generations get it much more easily than a baby boomer or someone older.

BY: That's great to hear. I mean, as a historian, I'm always interested in how to, I mean, I just think our main audience should be young people, and feel too often like our main audience is actually quite old, and so how best to reach them? And I'm fascinated by what directions or steps Densho might be taking, other than just being online. So, for instance, I came across a piece that Nina had written about the "5 Badass Japanese American Women," and it just had such a youthful tone to it, it's "dude-centric," and the kind of terms it used is... how much do you want to move in that direction, or is that piece just specific to a blog style?

TI: Well, I mean, strategically, what I view is, of foremost, what's paramount to us at Densho is that we have this really trusted repository of somewhat vetted content that will be around for a long, long time, if not forever. And the reason being is, by doing so and making it really accessible, people like Nina or others, anywhere in in the world, can actually, in some ways, repurpose those stories in ways that we don't even know how they're going to do it. We didn't know about podcasts or blogs or what's emerging, and we're working with some universities, things like machine learning algorithms to analyze our content to look at different connections in terms how we should think about, the example being, you get all this information from me in this interview. That's interesting, but how is it connected to the thousand other stories that is on Densho, or other repositories? And to have a human doing this, it would be impossible, it would take so much time. But then to have a machine do that for you, said, "Oh, it's interesting, Tom's story is actually very similar to these stories and for these reasons." And that you would see that and says, "Oh, that's interesting." Or something that is... I know this is very controversial, facial recognition. I talked about the eighty thousand objects, many of them are historic photographs, right? Many of them are photographs of people, we don't know who they are. But if we are creating this very detailed, comprehensive names registry of every Japanese American who was incarcerated, and we link that to one known photograph of that person, like we know this person looks like this, and then with facial recognition say, well, "Search all the other ones. Is there anywhere else that this person shows up?" And then for it to come back and say, "Oh, here are a dozen other photographs that we think this person is," and then we can take a look at this. "Oh, yeah, here are photographs that are out there that we didn't know that person was there." And so there was, again, this structured information and data that we can start doing in terms of making the archive more interesting.

BY: Yeah, it's kind of a different context than it's normally used, connectivity as well, because the researchers can hopefully with these kinds of algorithms will be able to find all these connected aspects of the research.