Digital Archive
No relevant timeline
No relevant location
Angelina Cheng
From the beginning, I was lost.
So lost. I cannot even explain how lost. I started this project with basically no knowledge on history in California much less Black history in California, but being able to read with a critical eye and work in a community that had an understanding of the community and the nuances. During my time with this project, I was able to get immersed in the time period and help create something impactful for the Initiative.
How I began.
We all have to start somewhere. From the first couple of weeks, I reviewed current digital archives so that I could gain a better understanding of how archival research information is usually cataloged. I familiarized myself with the software used for website design and building. Coming from business and economics classes, I knew that I didn’t know a lot about these topics, and the readings and discussions were truly teaching me what I didn’t even know I didn’t know. I wanted to be able to represent the concepts we learned in a proper manner, utilizing key design principles like hierarchy, grouping, whitespace, alignment, and more. Meeting Luna over Zoom for the first time was also incredibly eye-opening. She showed us her persistence in research against roadblocks and barriers and taught me so many ways to do archival research. I never considered that banks might keep such helpful records, and that we would get such insightful information from death certificates. As someone approaching all this information for the first time, my lens as a new learner has helped me create a website that is useful for those who are new to the topic as well.
Familiarizing myself.
The London Nelson Legacy Initiative website from the Museum of Arts & History (MAH) was a great first look at an archival website design. As a business student, most things are about marketing, sales, IT support, etc., which has goals for a website that may differ a lot from this sort of educational, community-oriented purpose. With little guidance, I had initially created a draft of a website on Figma so that I could explore possible styles and formats. I was able to utilize YouTube tutorials and follow guides from the California State Library on how to use their search models to build my own style. During this time, I was also able to get in contact with someone at the MAH to gather some information regarding LNLI branding with colors and fonts.
Exploring...
Research in the community means being where the community and where the information is!
As we went to various sites, rather than doing research on a particular topic, I had the chance to bounce between different projects in the class and view what documents my peers were looking at. I would search through documents largely out of curiosity and also to get a better idea of how to better represent documents. With how newspapers used to be formatted with columns and how older documents used to be written in cursive, I wanted to be able to represent these in alt-text and being able to view examples of these papers gave me a better idea of what might be difficult accessibility-wise. During these weeks, I spent a lot of time reviewing iPhone accessibility settings to see what tends to be common accessibility settings. This meant trying to find a format that would follow the typical up-down or left-right sequence. I found out more about dyslexia fonts and how those could be implemented.
We had the chance to visit the California State Library and review things inside of the History Room. It was amazing being able to see the actual physical copies of a lot of things, hear from the librarians how information was compiled, and also see for myself their collections. I had requested a particular newspaper from the timeline that we were interested in so that I would be able to get a better understanding of the accessibility difficulties and contents inside of different media types. Additionally, I was able to talk a little bit more with Forest and Vanessa about their project to understand how their research has been going and how they have been approaching it. When creating the website, I want to understand the different user groups that will be touching it. For example, there is the just generally interested user group and the user groups who are aiming to do specific research. Bouncing off of my initial intentions, I want to make sure that the website is accessible to all!
At the library, I had the chance to take a picture of examples of how people have sorted things, the organization methods inside of different books themselves, the abbreviations that they use, example legends, and more. These provide my examples of how I might organize the website for better viewing. Similar to the library page, having some sort of guide would make it more accessible to those who have never used it before. I’ve included images below of our time at the library, taking pictures of documents in the relevant timeline, adding features into Figma and documenting what I saw inside the archives, as well as our group photo of our UC Santa Cruz partnership with the London Nelson Legacy Initiative.
Testing the waters.
At this time, I’d also been getting myself more familiar with Figma, working on creating multiple moving parts that can be used in a simulation for the final project presentation. An image of my Figma workspace is included below as well as a link to a showing of the interactive parts of the website draft.
Finalization
It was around this time that I had the chance to have more of a sit-down opportunity to speak with Luna. This allowed me to glean a couple of key features that the London Nelson Legacy Initiative had planned for the website. It was around this time that I moved from a draft from Figma over to Wix to create a website that could be attached to their existing website domain to officially be used. With the creation of the website, I had huge decisions to make regarding the format and how projects would be represented. I tested different formats, tools, and databases to best keep track of information for each project and presented my suggestion to the team.
My results...
The product of the website is what you see right now! It has been built as a living document for the London Nelson Legacy Initiative to continuously serve the community.