Building a prototype for Koreatowns in North Texas has been a challenging experience. This course has helped me to take a step back from the initial stages of my project and reconsider my audience. While learning about user-centered approaches to designing a digital project site, I encountered other challenges that I did not consider in the beginning. By studying the physical and digital spaces of a history museum, I was able to see things clearer. Also, studying various digital public history sites was very insightful. Learning about the different digital interfaces and digital tools, reading various scholarship on the digital public history, and testing digital public history sites have helped me to build a prototype.
I selected Omeka for the prototype because it was user-friendly and easy to navigate. It also allowed me to design my project site with creative freedom. The storyboarding technique, mentioned in Shawn Medero’s article “Paper Prototyping,” helped me to visualize the interface for Koreatowns in North Texas. In addition to storyboarding, I learned about the importance of testing and evaluating the prototype. I asked several people to visit Koreatowns in North Texas and provide feedback. Their comments helped me to see things that would be helpful for the audience when navigating the site. The comments from Dr. Leon were also helpful. My classmate’s review/feedback was helpful, but I think having more than one classmate to review the site would have been more helpful to gain more than one perspective.
Overall, I learned that building a prototype for a digital public history site is very challenging; yet the process is a great learning experience. This course has allowed to me explore things that I would not have done on my own such as building a prototype, accessing course materials, and learning different techniques to engage the audience. Since there is little information available online about the history and culture of Koreatowns and Korean Americans in North Texas, I was excited to build a prototype for the information to be available to the public. Finding time to take the images was a little bit challenging because I had to find the time to visit the places during the week and before sundown. After taking the images, I carefully selected the images that would be the best fit for the prototype. Before I learned to incorporate oral history into the prototype, I learned how to interview wonderful people who have close connections to the Korean American communities in North Texas. Another challenge that I encountered was the visual display of my images and text. I learned to experiment with different layouts of the images in Omeka. Writing short descriptions and narratives paved the way for me to understand my audience better. I had to consider the language usage and colloquialism, so I would not lose my audience to an abyss of words. Despite the challenges, I received so much support from the Korean American community. Finding the right people to interview was easy, but finding the time to interview them in person was a good challenge. Also, Dr. Sharon Leon has provided supportive and constructive feedback to lead me in the direction of learning something new in order to see the benefits down the road when I further develop my prototype.
Before the end of this semester, I revisited Michael Frisch’s article. In “From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen and Back,” Michael Frisch explains the purpose of exploring: “Exploring, I think, is more interesting than searching, and it suggests a non-linear spatial imagination rather than a linear, tunneled one: one inhabits a space that is being explored rather than simply forging a narrowing path through it” (133). For my prototype, I came to a realization that I want the audience to explore instead of just search for information and images on the site. I want them to come away with some ideas or information that make them think about the reasons why Korean American history is rarely available online. Also, I hope their explorations and curiosities can help me to continue building the prototype. Ultimately, I want Koreatowns in North Texas to be our digital public history project by inviting people from different backgrounds and experiences to share in the building of the site as a community. The key to making the prototype available to the public would be an engaging collaboration with the audience. Echoing Corbett and Miller, “Honest sharing, a willingness to surrender some intellectual control, is the hardest part of public history practice because it is the aspect most alien to academic temperament and training” (36), I am steadily learning to take less control of my project and reconsider my audience. The question of “How do I engage my audience?” changed to “What are some changes that can be made to the prototype for audience engagement while connecting them to the purpose of preserving the history and culture of Koreatowns in North Texas and the Korean American experience?”
