diaspora

Have you ever searched yourself on the internet? Dig into every search result to see what is mentioned about you? Can you find social media pages? Pictures of yourself? In this project, I sought to do just that: research more about myself. But instead of starting from my name, I sought to start from who gave me my name, and that is my parents!

Welcome!

My HathiTrust collection attempts to explore different parts of the Southeast Asian Diaspora to America with a focus on Vietnam. As a child of refugees from the Vietnam war, this project gave me the opportunity to investigate a more political and historical point of view of the United States in the 1900s. Pieces feature a local newspaper about a Vietnamese community in Virginia, the naturalization and immigration processes, a directory of public programs for Indochinese refugees, and more! I wanted to know the circumstances my parents and relatives were in that causes them to be a part of the diaspora to the United States, and understand from an academic perspectives the processes they went through to acclimate and assimilate to a new foreign world.

My sister was born in 1998, a year after the article below was published. My parents heavily relied on government programs and the community they resided in to provide support in their transition to the States and the piece details so the programs provided. Kentwood, Michigan is now a huge hub for immigrants. So much so, my high school was the 7th most diverse in the country when I graduated in 2018. Additionally, many of the Vietnamese students at the University of Michigan is from the Grand Rapids area similar to myself.

Sawyer Seminars Synergies

Barbara’s discussion the Sawyer talks detailing HaithTrust’s data and metadata search methodologies came full circle when I was curating my own collection. I wanted a diverse set of pieces that would be representative of the political climate at the time in regards to immigration pre and post Vietnam War. Using quotes, experimenting with different languages and terms, etc. I sometimes found myself struggling to find many pieces with a direct tie to my intended topic.

This reminded me of Ben from the Sawyer Seminar and our in class discussions with librarians about optical character recognition (OCR). Whenever I try to use the search feature to locate specific key works, most of the time I am not about to get results. Therefore, it required more manual efforts to dissect each piece in our class’ collections. As programs continue to be developed and improved to better recognize text and especially different languages, I hope in relation to our hopes to develop a game, this helps computers to capture more nuances while ensure the accuracy of pieces. As seen in Teddy’s collection, reputable databases can easily mislabel translations themselves. OCR also allows for archives, historical records, books, etc. to be more accessible opening infinite possibilities in terms of study, research, and translation.

Connections to other Collections

One of the more clear similarities I found across all collections in our class where how each individual came to choosing their own respective themes. Initial discussions in class led to Randy, Anuja, and I all choosing the focus of our pieces to be inspired from our childhood. Upon further exploration, Claire and Kimberly also based their findings on experiences that compelled them to more formerly engage with their native cultures. Through our collections, we were all able to divulge more intentionally about our own backgrounds.

Other clear connections include the geographic focus in Asia given by the class, variety of text in terms of date, medium (pictures, videos, poetry, art), and variety of dialects or languages found in each.