Tag Archives: San Francisco

Community Webs Digitization Grant Reveals Stories of San Francisco’s Immigrant Communities

The following guest post from Christina Moretta, Photo Curator and Acting San Francisco History Center Manager at San Francisco Public Library, is part of a series written by members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories.

San Francisco History Center (SFHC) of the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) is the official archive for the City and County of San Francisco. SFHC serves all library users and levels of interest, from the merely curious to those engaging in scholarly research. Because of the Center’s archival function, it also administers the archival collections of the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center.

Internet Archive has supported our work to preserve and provide access to San Francisco’s history in many ways. Since 2007, Internet Archive has hosted SFPL digitized content, including local documents and city directories. In 2017, SFPL became one of the first members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. This program has provided us with the tools we need to preserve local web-based content that will be important for future researchers investigating San Francisco’s history.

In 2023, the Community Webs program was awarded a grant from the National Historical Publication and Records Commission for the “Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections” project. This grant supported the digitization of local history collections from libraries across the country, including SFPL. With this support, 23 bound volumes of a Chinese/English language newspaper East/West and 4 cartons of oral histories from the Paul Radin Papers were digitized by Internet Archive.

Cover of East/West, 1968, Vol. 2, no. 23

East/West

The East/West (Dong xi bao) newspaper was acquired the easy way – original subscription by the SFPL’s Periodical Department in the late 1960s. There are only a handful of institutions that have East/West in their holdings as microfilm only. SFHC has the complete run in paper format.

In late 1966, Gordon Lew and two Chinese newspaper colleagues, Kenneth Joe and Ken Wong, began the idea of East/West, a bilingual weekly newspaper published out of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The inaugural issue was in January 1967 and the newspaper ran for over twenty-two years with the last issue in September 1989. Lew became the publisher and editor, Joe worked in the Chinese section, and Wong was the principal writer in the English section. East/West was an important community newspaper, with extensive coverage of local Chinatown news, social activities, the work of Chinese American political figures, and international developments such as the normalization of China ties.

East/West was published in English and Chinese, and for many years, the two sections had approximately the same number of pages. The editorial and perhaps the main news article in the English section would be translated into Chinese. The Chinese section tended to focus more on culture, arts, and history, and it often reprinted articles from other sources. Advertisements filled both sections from the very beginning for local businesses and services. Most were community ads as the newspaper served non-profit organizations that arose in the wake of the Chinese American and Asian American empowerment movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Miss Chinatown, East/West, 1977, Vol. 11, no. 9, p. 14

Researchers and scholars of 20th-century Chinese American communities in the United States will appreciate the online availability of this unique resource. Many important issues cropped up in Chinese America and Asian America starting in the late 1960s and these can be found in East/West from the community perspective. By being a bilingual publication, the newspaper captured and shared the voice of the community. In addition, San Francisco Chinese Americans had limited political power in the 1960s. East/West focused on emerging Chinese American political figures and urged the community to increase its voting and general political participation.

Browse East/West on archive.org

Paul Radin Papers

In 2003, the Paul Radin Papers were donated to the SFHC by Professor Luis S. Kemnitzer of San Francisco State University on behalf of Calvin Fast Wolf and Mary Sacharoff-Fast Wolf. Mary Wolf was a would-be biographer of Radin who had acquired original papers from her friend and Radin’s widow, Doris Woodward Radin, as well as colleagues.

Dr. Paul Radin (1883-1959) is considered to be one of the formative influences in contemporary anthropology and ethnography in the United States and Europe. The bulk of the Paul Radin Papers consists of surveys from Radin’s supervision of over 200 workers who interviewed ethnic groups in the San Francisco Bay Area for the State Emergency Relief Administration of California (SERA) over a period of nine months in 1934-1935. Known as SERA project 2-F2-98 (3-F2-145), its abstract was published in 1935 as The Survey of San Francisco’s Minorities: Its Purpose and Results. The stated purpose was a cultural survey to find employment for “white collar” unemployed workers on temporary relief. Radin’s focus was “to study the steps in the adjustment and assimilation of minority groups in San Francisco and Alameda counties.” Bypassing a typical questionnaire method, Radin instead had the amateur interviewers record anything and everything which the interviewees wished to say. The results appear in a narrative format—sometimes in the form of poetry and short stories—and encompass all manner of immigrant experiences. Survey materials include typed and handwritten interviews and research on ethnic groups. Some interviewers identify themselves, and their report appears in their own hand.

Jon Y. Lee’s notes, Paul Radin Papers

A portion of the Paul Radin Papers includes SERA worker Jon Y. Lee’s papers including material for The Golden Mountain. Lee was the son of Chinese immigrants who settled in Oakland, California. Radin hired Lee as a fieldworker to collect Chinatown traditions in Oakland, California. Today, Lee is recognized as the first Asian American to work professionally as a folklorist.

With this collection online, international scholars can now easily access narratives about the immigrant experience from their country/region to assist with their diaspora studies. The typed descriptions allow for OCR discovery and for one to gather more information on the San Francisco immigrant experience in the 1910s and 1920s.

Mrs. R narrative, Paul Radin Papers

Browse the Paul Radin Papers on archive.org


Internet Archive and Community Webs are thankful for the support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections, which will digitize and provide access to a diverse range of local history archives that represent the experiences of immigrant, indigenous, and African American communities throughout the United States.

Pro-Airbnb advertising dominated recent political TV ads in San Francisco

Based on algorithmic analysis, Pro-Airbnb advertising dominated political TV ads in San Francisco in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Two thirds of the minutes devoted to political ads on several initiatives and races before voters focused on arguments against a proposal to curb the company’s operations in the city, according to a review of the Internet Archive television archive. Voters ended up rejecting Proposition F, whose opponents claimed it would encourage neighbors to spy on each other and increase lawsuits, by a margin of 55 to 45 percent.

Minutes of TV Political Ads in San Francisco

The Archive identified total of 1,959 minutes of ads (4,591 plays) opposing Proposition F, out of 2,895 minutes devoted to all political TV ads, or roughly two thirds of the air-time.

To put that in perspective, Mayor Ed Lee, who won his reelection easily, was the subject of only 55 minutes of ads. Though he appeared in and narrated hundreds of ads supporting Propositions A and D, the only ads that mention his mayoral race were airings of a support ad paid for not by his own campaign, but rather by an independent expenditure from Clint Reilly, a local real estate developer and former professional political consultant.

Samples of all ads found to be related to 2015 San Francisco elections can be viewed here, and metadata about those that occurred in archived television can be downloaded from this page.

The only political ad that aired on television in support of proposition F was this one, which was observed for a total of 16 minutes between October 16th to 25th. The ad, which features a parody of the Eagles’ song “Hotel California,” was pulled from Youtube and the ShareBetterSF campaign website because of claims of copyright infringement. Dale Carlson, a spokesman for the campaign who contacted the Archive, wrote “We believe the ad is parody and did not constitute a copyright violation. But it had already run its course and we weren’t going to spend money on legal bills to defend an ad that was already off the air.”

In all, the Archive identified 14 unique ads opposing Proposition F that aired on TV. In the final days of the campaign, the opponents devoted airtime to this ad that calls the proposal “too extreme,” quotes from the San Francisco Chronicle, and cites high profile opponents such as Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Mayor Lee. This 30-second ad aired 423 times on 10 channels in San Francisco (CNBC, CNN, FOXNEWS, KGO, KNTV, KOFY, KPIX, KRON, KTVU, MSNBC).

This review updates an earlier one issued last week focused exclusively on Airbnb ads, broadening the analysis to include all political TV ads aired from August 25th through November 3.  The Archive identified ads through a number of sources, including SFGov’s Summary of Third Party Expenditures Regarding San Francisco Candidates hosted by the City of San Francisco. An audio fingerprint was created for each ad and used to find matches in some 35,000 hours of archived local station programming and cable news network shows available in the San Francisco region.  The Internet Archive’s television news research library presents public opportunities to search, compare and contrast news programs in its archive.  Entertainment programming is only available for select algorithmic study within its server environment.

The Internet Archive’s review of political TV ads relating to Proposition F is part of experimentation in preparation for our new Knight Foundation funded project to track political TV ads in key primary states. Stay tuned for news about our December launch.

Research by Trevor von Stein

Pro-Airbnb political TV ads air at rate of 100:1 as San Franciscans head to polls

For every one minute of political ads aired in favor of a contentious ballot initiative intended to further regulate Airbnb’s growing presence in the city where it is headquartered, more than 100 minutes of ads urging them to vote “no,” have aired on local San Francisco area TV stations, according to an assessment of the Internet Archive’s television archive.

Audio fingerprinting of YouTube-hosted advertising was used to identify the same ads in local station programming and cable news networks available in the region, from August 25th through October 26th.  Sample ads can be viewed here, and metadata about their occurrences can be downloaded from this page.

Proposition F, which is backed by a coalition of unions, land owners, housing advocates, and neighborhood groups, would restrict private rentals to 75 nights per year as well as enact rules that would ensure that hotel taxes are paid and city code followed. It would also allow private party lawsuits by neighbors against private renters suspected of violating the law.

The Internet Archive found just one TV ad favoring the initiative, also appeared on the Proposition F campaign website. The Archive discovered 32 instances of this ad airing on local TV stations, for a total of 16 minutes of airplay. However, the ad, which features a parody of the song “Hotel California,” by the Eagles, (the lyrics were replaced with “Hotel San Francisco,”) was recently removed from the official website because of a claim of copyright infringement.

In contrast, in our sample range, Airbnb supporters aired more than 26 hours of ads against the initiative. One example ad, which is below, claims that the initiative would “encourage neighbors to spy on each other,” and “create thousands of new lawsuits.” This ad played at least 358 times in recent weeks, for a total of 179 minutes of airtime.

Over all, according to reports filed with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, opponents of Proposition F have reported spending $6.5 million compared to $256,000 from organizations supporting the initiative.

Of course the ad campaigns are not just limited to television. Airbnb apologized last week after it caught flack for a series of controversial bus stations and billboard ads that critics called “passive aggressive” and “whiny,”  for complaining about how public institutions, such as libraries, spent their tax revenue-derived budgets.

But TV remains a key way that political operators try to influence voters. As Nate Ballard, a Democratic strategist recently said on a local newscast: “That’s how you win campaigns in California, on TV.”

The Internet Archive’s review of political TV ads relating to Proposition F is part of experimentation in preparation for our new Knight Foundation funded project to track political TV ads in key primary states. Stay tuned for news about our December launch.

research by Trevor von Stein