Born-Digital Materials, bulk: 2017-07-08 - 2020, 2015-01-13 - 2020

The materials in this series contain offensive and harmful language and imagery including racist and violent references and imagery. The purpose of this note is to give users the opportunity to decide whether they need or want to view these materials, or at least, to mentally or emotionally prepare themselves to view the materials. 

The Born-digital materials series consists of digital photographs, video recordings, typed narratives, archived web pages, archived tweets and twitter IDs, and digitial audio files.

The Stories and audiovisual materials submitted via online collection site subseries consists of digital photographs, video recordings, and typed narratives submitted via an online portal on the University of Virginia Collection on the Events in Charlottesville, VA, August 11-13, 2017 digital collection website, and include descriptive information, dates, and locations provided by the donors.

The digital photographs and video recordings include documentation of KKK members and of protesters taken during the July 8 KKK rally, pictures of “Unite the Right” protesters, counter-protesters, and police taken during the August 12 “Unite the Right” rally, and pictures of events, memorials, memorabilia that document the community response to the events of August 11 and 12, 2017. The contents of these materials detail the movements of people in Charlottesville leading up to the confrontations that took place on July 8, and on August 12 at Market Street Park (formerly known as Lee Park and later Emancipation Park) when violence errupted. They also exhibit the many examples of the responses from the community of Charlottesville in the form of temporary memorials, like flowers, signs, messages written on walls.

The narratives describe the personal accounts and experiences of individuals from events that occurred on August 11 and 12, 2017, and also reflections on white supremacy and violence in Charlottesville. They also document some of the emotional responses to events of August 11 and 12, 2017. This subseries also includes a small number of emails sent to University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan.

The Archived webpages subseries is divided into two separate files, each of which is a collection of archived websites. Each consists of archived websites and webpages relating to the events in Charlottesville, VA on August 11 and 12, 2017 made accessible via the provided hyperlinks.

The first directs researchers to the University of Virginia Collection on Events in Charlottesville, VA, August 11-13, 2017 web archive on the Archive-It website. The second directs researchers to the web archive collection titled, "MSS16386_WARNING_OFFENSIVECONTENT" accessible on the ReplayWeb website. The collections include archived websites and webpages in various formats (blogs, forums, news websites, and social media) relating to the events of August 11 and 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, VA and their aftermath. Hyperlinks to articles, blogs, listservs, community sites, and other web content from the wake of August 11 and 12, 2017 were gathered and archived from 2017 through 2020.

The Arhived tweets and Twitter datasets subseries includes archived social media that reveals some of the conversation around Charlottesville as a political focal point on Twitter. Tweets that were captured, and Tweet IDs and Twitter datasets that were harvested using Twarc, Twitter APIs, Archive-It, and webrecorder during and after August 11 and 12, 2017, and on the one-year anniversary of the “Unite the Right” rally are distributed across the political spectrum. A wide range of hashtags for Charlottesville, hoosagainsthate, and hoostogether were captured for the collection, as well as timelines and accounts from the university and from the city of Charlottesville. At this time this subseries is not open for research, but will be made available when it is processed.

The Audio-cassette subseries consists of digital audio files from the download card that was included with the set of two audio-cassettes. The content of the audio-cassettes, and of the digital files are recorded songs created in response to the events of August 11 and 12, 2017, and were donated with a printed track listing.