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.
