interviews – Online Portfolio

May 15, 2018 (Final Self-Reflection)

The best way to learn more about Digital Humanities is working with people who have the knowledge and expertise in the field. After learning from the best professors selected by the GMU program, I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Pamela (Pam) Henson, Historian for Smithsonian Institution Archives, and her research assistant, Lisa. During my internship with the Smithsonian for two semesters, I have gained new skills to help me complete my digital public humanities site and to teach my undergraduate students about digital humanities as an introductory course. For this Spring semester, I used what I have learned in my graduate courses as well as from my own teaching experience to design an oral history collection. Pam selected Lucile Quarry Mann to be the first from the many collections (150 and counting) for my internship project.

Before I worked with Pam, I had minimal knowledge about oral history. After reading and researching more about oral history, I realized how it is a crucial component of digital humanities and the preservation of living history. Listening to the recorded interviews, which were originally recorded with tape recorders in the 1970s, has helped me to appreciate the unique discourse of oral history interviews between an interviewer and interviewee. The concept of digitizing audio recordings of interviews is fascinating because it allows the current audience to have access to living history in different formats. I also learned the importance of keeping track of everything such as documenting each interview with detailed information by viewing the transcripts and notes that were documented by Pam.

Designing a digital platform for an oral history collection comes with several challenges. One of the challenges was to present the material in a way that would engage a broad audience. In the designing stages of the digital platform, I used the skills that I have learned from the DH courses and my teaching experience. I have been teaching online since 2007, and one of my courses introduces students to think and analyze visual content from a rhetorical perspective for a writing course. Another challenge was selecting a segment of a full interview to introduce to the audience. The interview segment had to be short (5 minutes or less). There were a couple of interesting segments that lasted 10 minutes, but they were too long. The next challenge was to select images from the archives to correspond with the interview. In addition to posting images and text with the interview segment (e.g. image carousel), I came up with an idea of creating videos that combined the audio recording of the selected interview segment with images. I enjoyed the creative process of making a video because I was able to improve my video making skills while incorporating some of the techniques and skills that I have learned from my DH courses. The other challenge was making sure that there was enough memory or space for posting images and videos on the selected web page. These challenges provided a pathway for designing a digital platform for an oral history collection.

Working with Pam and Lisa has helped me to re-envision my design for Lucile Q. Mann’s oral history collection. From our weekly teleconferences and feedbacks, we collaborated to make the oral history and video history collections website possible for future launching. The progress is steady. Their helpful feedbacks were encouraging. I also provided feedback for the introductory pages of the oral history and video history collections website. Pam created a template that was modeled after my web page designs for Lucile Q. Mann’s oral history collection for future interns who will be working to put together oral history collections for the Smithsonian Institution. I am very excited that my work helped with designing the template for future oral history collections. I am very proud to be part of their project. I enjoyed working with a supportive and intelligent group, and I look forward to viewing the oral history collection on the Smithsonian Institution website when it is completed.

This semester’s internship has given me a new perspective on how oral history plays a significant role as a component of Digital Humanities. Presenting information from the past to an audience of the present and future is less challenging when certain digital tools, theories, and skills are used. How do we keep the changing audience interested in the people of the past? What digital tools are useful for creating and designing a new digital platform to present the past? How do we try to preserve the past without losing sight of our focus? Even though the past will remain constant in a form of a recorded interview in the case of Lucile Quarry Mann’s oral history collection, it is up to the digital humanities scholar/specialist to work with others to keep it visible and interesting in the present and for the future. It is also up to a collaborative group of people with various skill sets to help preserve the past and curate it as part of living history. Therefore, I plan to continue networking with people to encourage collaboration for my own digital public humanities project on Korean American history and culture while working on honing my oral history interviewing skills for future interviews.

March 9, 2018

For the past few weeks, I have been working with Pam and her assistant Lisa to redesign and re-envision the Smithsonian’s oral history website. After reviewing, evaluating, and discussing 8 different oral history websites, each of us came up with ideas for a website redesign plan. I used the skills that were learned during my GMU Digital Humanities coursework. I also incorporated skills from designing my own websites. I imagined at least 2 different personas to approach my design from an audience’s perspective. Then, I typed a document that explains each part of the redesigned website. After I wrote my draft, I sketched what the redesigned website would look like. I learned this skill in Dr. Leon’s class when I was designing my public history website. I drew 4 different web pages of the website with a pencil (traced it over with a dark blue ink pen) on white sheets of 8 x11 paper: main page, about page, oral history interview pages A and B. I included a menu with clearly labeled buttons that will allow the user to learn about the site, navigate the oral history collections, listen and/view the oral history interviews, and read about interview’s background. It also included copyright information, a finding aid, map, timeline, and a contribution page for future crowdsourcing. Then, I scanned the completed sketches and saved them into a .pdf file. At the time I was redesigning the website, I was unaware that they had a current website. I was referencing the old website from 2004. I was informed about the current website when Pam, Lisa, and I re-convened to discuss our redesign plans. Fortunately, it all worked out. I suggested adding a timeline and map. The importance of having a timeline and/or map was something I learned in Dr. Kelly’s class. It helps the audience visualize the locations and time period when connecting them to the historical content. Also, I suggested placing a short video 1-2 minutes on the main page to introduce one of their featured collections to draw in the audience and engage them to explore their site and oral history collections. The other option was to include 1 or 2 paragraphs about the featured collection with selected images.

The next part of my internship is to create a way to sort and bring one of the collections together. Pam has suggested focusing on women at the Smithsonian, so we agreed it was good start. I received several audio interview recordings, transcripts, blog links about Lucile (Lucy) Quarry Mann. I am in the process of listening to the interviews while viewing the transcripts. Each interview is 30 minutes or more. During this time, I have created a short video (59 seconds) to get an idea of what a short video would look like to draw the audience to Lucy Mann’s oral history interviews. I used iMovie to created my video. Since the video was too large to send via email to Pam and Lisa, I had to post it on my YouTube Channel. Here is a link to my humble and short video: https://youtu.be/caC-9EFBcGM

February 9, 2018

I enjoyed the selected readings that were recommended by my Smithsonian mentor, Pam Henson. She encouraged me to read Oral History and Digital Humanities edited by Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson before I start my internship work. The essays in the book helped me to see a different perspective of Digital Humanities, and it gave me enough background information of how oral history became integrated into the digital world. Also, oral history is a component of Digital Humanities, and it has some interesting roots. Each of the authors described their challenges and recommendations of presenting oral history on a digital platform. The methods described in the book were insightful and informative. With advancing technology, they had to constantly tweak a few things to present oral history interviews online. The concept of the audience from each author reminded me of my GMU Digital Humanities course lesson on audience or user. I thought about the type of persona they had to imagine when making adjustments to their work. In addition to budget concerns and having enough manpower, collaboration was a key factor. This book provided good resources, past and present, that revealed the changes and importance of keeping the content significant with advancing technology. I reviewed some of the older oral history websites and noticed how they much they have changed due to change in technology, budget, manpower, collaboration, and audience. Therefore, these changes are no different from creating and maintaining a digital public humanities site.

Also, Pam introduced me to 8 different Oral History websites for evaluation. Pam, Lisa (Pam’s research assistant), and I are in the process of evaluating them in order to design Smithsonian’s Oral History Archive online. So far, I have reviewed 3 oral history websites. Carefully evaluating each site helped me to come up with ideas to improve my own public humanities website. There are themes and trends that seem to be outdated on a few sites, but the content is very useful if certain things were changed. Even though I am evaluating each site from my own perspective, I am constantly reminded in the back of my mind that the user is also looking for something else. During my coursework, I learned about the importance of designing a digital platform with several personae in mind. The digital tools and presentation of the oral history interviews are very important. The description or metadata comes back to haunt me in a good way. Learning about Dublin Core at the beginning of the GMU DH program helped me to look for the basic elements for each interview. Also, I am learning to see differences on how transcripts are displayed on each site.

The work that I have completed for the past few weeks have encouraged me to use my learned knowledge during my GMU coursework and experience with designing my own digital public humanities and teaching history and literature sites. I am excited about working with Pam and Lisa. Pam has been very helpful, and I appreciate the knowledge she has shared with me. I look forward to working on their oral history archive site.

A Reflection on Previous Interviews

After viewing the previous interviews, I learned that the process of revising and narrowing a lesson is the norm. During the project making process, I was a little worried that I was not getting my point across; and I continued to add more material. Celeste and Jeri mentions starting with an existing argument, and I thought about Dr. Kelly’s advice to narrow my focus on what part of the historical content does not make sense to my students. I will narrow my focus and not make it bigger than it should be. Also, I will select 1-3 primary sources to help my students think about history and make connections to the novel. Teaching students to access primary sources online from reliable websites is very important. Also, teaching students what to do with the primary sources is very challenging but exciting. The focus on digital media or digital resources are mentioned in all of the interviews. Maura Seale makes an excellent point about teaching students to engage with the primary sources by exposing them to archives and collections. Devon Hardy’s emphasis on Learning Objectives is spot on because she knows the importance of keeping the audience in mind while creating a digital history project. I added a few learning outcomes on my site. She also mentioned learning assessment, which is very important these days in education. For the future, I will have to consider a plan to design an assessment for my project’s learning outcomes.

Designing my project site will require a few more changes because I would like to use it as a supplement to my course in ecampus. It would be a good ready to go class as mentioned by Erin Bush. If ecampus (Blackboard) is down, then I can always refer to my project site without worries. Also, I can make additional changes without dealing with weekly and unwanted system updates. My project did not turn out what I wanted initially, but I enjoyed the process of creating it. Nate Sleeter also mentioned that his project did not come out exactly as he was hoping. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that digital history projects are work in progress due to changing times, advancing technology, differing perspectives, innovative teaching methods, broadening of diversity, and new ideas. There is always going to be something interesting to uncover when learning about the past, and in the field Digital Humanities, a digital history project is one of the means of engaging the general public, students, and/or scholars to explore, examine, and analyze the past.