King in the Wilderness movie posterTo make King in the Wilderness, an HBO documentary about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final three years, documentarian Peter Kunhardt recorded more than 31 hours of interviews with 19 people who witnessed and made history with King, only a tiny fraction of which made it into the film. In response, JSTOR Labs created the Interview Archive, a prototype project that includes all the uncut interviews with Civil Rights leaders such Marian Wright Edelman, John Lewis, and Harry Belafonte.

As Director of JSTOR Labs Alex Humphreys explains in the History News Network, the site also helps researchers and students explore the material: Each minute of each interview is tagged with the people, places, organizations, and topics being discussed so users can jump to other mentions of the topic in the Interview Archive, get background information from Wikipedia, or discover related scholarly literature and historical images in JSTOR and Artstor.