My project is to show where the early Chinese immigrants to America come from in China and where in America they end up. I will use Paladio to show this map network. The target audiences of my project is scholars, Chinese Americans, and the general public who are interested in this topic.
1. Scholars of digital humanities and those who are interested in it
First of all, I will open a blog introducing my project: the goals, the tools, the rationale and the source. Then I will establish three tabs for the three audiences. Under “scholarly thinking on digital humanities” tab, I will discuss my exercise to combine traditional historical research and digital tool such as what difficulties I find, what may be useful for other academic research and the significance or potentials of this experiment for history study. I may also reflect my thought by applying digital humanities technology to the teaching of history in classroom. It is a professional.
After finishing this blog, I will share the link to the professional organizations where I’m a member such as AHA, the scholars I know, and the websites which provide professional network with other scholars such as H-Net. I will also share my link to the facebook and twitter pages of these places and my own personal account. I also want to make a video about my project using Echo 360 and upload it to youtube.
I want to convey a message that my project invites academic discussion on the project. After expressing my idea, design and practice, I would like to have feedback from other scholars so that I can improve my project. Their feedback is also the way to measure the success of my strategy because if I successfully let the professional people know of my project and they are interested, they will contact me.
2. Scholars of China Studies
To target this group, I will write down my thought under the tab “scholarly thinking on China Studies”. In this part, I will focus on the academic discussion on China, instead of the digital means to conduct historical research though I will discuss digital humanities in brief. The social media tools I will use are facebook, twitter and professional websites. In sharing the link to my blog, I will appeal to the audience with my discussion on the locations on the map. For example, who most of early Chinese immigrants came from a certain location of a province instead of another? Is the information shown by my map the same as the conclusion of the previous studies or is there anything new? What are the possible reasons behind people of a certain place went to America instead of countries? Besides the facebook and twitter pages, I will post a thread in the facebook discussion group of China studies, the forum on the websites of H-Net, American Historical Association and Association of Asian Studies. Meanwhile, I will also post this to the Chinese equivalent of these websites in China. I hope my blog would be a discussion forum on this specific immigrant issue.
3. the general public
I target the general public who is interested in this immigration study. I will set up a wikipedia entry and post on Facebook and twitter too. Through the outsourcing in wikipedia, I may find new useful facts about my study. It can help me reach a wider public, professionals and non-professionals. The third tab after “scholarly thinking on digital humanities” and “scholarly thinking on China Studies” in my blog is “the fun fact of early Chinese immigrants”. I hope the title could attract the interest of those who are not history professionals. To keep their interest going on, I will publish these facts bit by bit on facebook and twitter followed by the link to the blog. I will also post the pictures of map on Pinterest. By using these tools, I do not only share and publish my research but I also hope these people can provide me with more facts I might neglect in my research. Through the outsourcing, I think it is possible to make good use of the “public wisdom”. To measure my success, I will look at the numbers of comments, shares, visits to the website and the messages they leave.
My blog is not static. I want to keep updating it with my latest thought, interaction with these three groups of people and even new research. And once updating it, I want to post this update on the facebook, twitter and and professional forums.
