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영어

Oral histories of Korean Americans depict cross-cultural and transnational experiences. The oral interviews of first-generation, 1.5, and second-generation Korean Americans add to the importance of collecting such oral histories in order to document and share them with the public. Most Korean Americans have a close connection to South Korea. Their Korean heritage is stressed in their challenges and successes of living and/or growing up in America. Korean Americans have contributed to education, workforce, economy, medicine, religion, politics, and the arts in the United States. Despite their efforts, information about their contributions is not shared nationwide. Hence, there should be a website that provides public access to information about Korean American history and culture. In order to achieve this goal, a digital humanities website that is comprised of oral interviews, images, descriptions, narratives, maps, timeline, and crowdsourcing is in progress. As a Digital Humanities scholar, I emphasize the mentioned elements by creating a user-friendly website for public access while preserving and documenting Korean American history and culture for current and future generations. According to the editors of Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement, “we now have incredible technologies that can disseminate oral history to a global audience almost instantaneously” (Boyd and Larson 2014). This results in a perfect combination of oral history and digital humanities. Tracing Korean American history and culture from the 1960s to present on a digital platform provides insight into the different lives of Korean Americans and their ties to Korea while highlighting their cross-cultural and transnational experiences in oral interviews.