Working on local history or an affinity-group community history mediated by digital technology invites various challenges. One challenge involves communication via the digital space. Selecting the right interface to present the public history contents requires carefully paying attention to the audience, design, and content management. Another challenge is creating ways to engage a broad audience. The digital public history site needs to be displayed in different ways to capture the audience’s attention in order to engage them. According to Gutterman, “Digital history scholars have emphasized the need for interactivity, but most digital history Web sites fail to attain this goal” (“Outhistory.org” 102). So, various digital tools or plug-ins have to be tested in order to find the right ones for engaging a broad audience. The third challenge would be designing the project’s site with various digital tools to create and share historical knowledge with a broad audience. For example, Outhistory.org invites the audience to “Create Content” and to share their stories “Tell Us Your Story.” They allow the audience to take part in building the digital public history site. Whether the audience is a scholar or someone from the general public, the digital technology must be accessible and user-friendly. The last challenge is to constantly keep the communication open for collaboration of new and shared ideas to maintain the digital public history site.
After carefully reading the articles and viewing the project sites of local history or affinity-group community history, I have noticed several things that I need to consider with developing my project. I am in the process of looking at another plugin to add to my project site. The plugin would be for a timeline. Another thing I would like to consider is reorganizing the featured sections. I may order the sections differently. Also, I would eventually need to test the site with actual users, people who represent my proposed audience/persona. Testing the site will help me see the flaws and gain knowledge about my real audience. To broaden my audience and to encourage more people to contribute to building the Koreatowns in North Texas project, I would like to add a Korean language feature; so I can include both English and Korean. Also, I have learned that I need to collaborate with more people who have knowledge about the Koreatowns and Korean American history in North Texas. The collaboration will help me with designing a bigger picture for my project. Therefore, while I am selecting the digital tools and designing the interface, I have to keep in mind the audience and the communities throughout the development of the project.
