Immigrant Stories

Reviewed By: Lini Radhakrishnan

Review Date: February 18, 2025

Site Link: https://immigrantstories.umn.edu

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/q4HvY

Keywords: Migration, Activism and Advocacy, Preservation, Sociology

Data Sources:

• Oral histories on video
  
• The archives and library in the Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA) at the University of Minnesota, which includes digitized immigrant letters and digital exhibits utilizing IHRCA materials.
  
• Minnesota Immigrants Collection includes audio interviews recording immigration stories of Minnesota residents.
  
• Free curricula and workshop guides for educators and students

Processes:

• The submitted videos are standardized in the sense that the story is narrated by the contributor about self/family members and is limited to a running time of 3 to 5 minutes.
  
• The site mainly serves as a portal to extensive collections including the IHRCA, the video/audio collection and the teaching resources.

Presentation:

The project is a web-based video archive that features over 402 immigrant stories emerging from fifty different communities. The landing page prominently features a call to participate, encouraging the viewer to create and submit their own immigration story. The cover image of a potential participant recording their story is followed by four video inserts, below which is a link to access the entire collection.

Digital Tools Used:

• Tools are not disclosed. Wappalyzer results suggest that the site uses OpenSSL web extensions, YouTube video players, JavaScript libraries (Jquery, Select2), ZURB foundation (UI frameworks) and Google Analytics.

Languages:

• English
  
• Videos of immigrant stories are in multiple languages although the majority appear to be in English.

Review

Immigrant Stories solicits participation from the viewer to contribute their immigrant stories to the research and archiving project run by their partner, Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) at the University of Minnesota. The site helps people settled in places outside their country of birth create digital stories recording their immigration journey. In some of the videos, the narrators are the subject’s children or grandchildren. Through a montage of faded photographs, the videos poignantly capture the difficult journeys of first-generation immigrants to a foreign country as they hold on to cultural practices/ material objects rooted in memories of their homeland and navigate the challenges of making a home away from home. The videos are well made, individualistic and provide an insightful window to the immigrant experience. The objective is to preserve these stories in IHRCA for posterity so that the collection is available to students, researchers and the public. Since 1965, IHRC has served as a resource for teaching and research about immigrants.

The site grants agency to the participant by allowing them to record their own story. The willing participant must sign up for an account to contribute and the subsequent process is not transparent. Currently, the sign up page simply states that creating an account will save the participant’s story automatically, includes an assurance that the shared email is secure and will only be used to share the story creation process. The lack of transparency on the actual process is ironically similar to the uncertainties of the immigration journeys that most immigrants must have undertaken and could potentially discourage some viewers from participating. Although, the site does provide access to all the earlier immigrant stories, so the potential participant gains a clear idea of the eventual outcome.

Presumably, the enrolled participant will be sent some version of the teaching guide with instructions on how to create a storyboard, record audio and video. The superior quality of the recorded videos in the collection validate the efficiency of the process. The guide itself is a well-conceived resource that can be adapted to build curriculums for teaching the complex subject of immigration. Apart from developing the required sensitivity to the topic, students will get the opportunity to build some important technical video/audio recording and editing skills.

The videos are primarily in English, and there are some recorded in other languages. To make the material more inclusive, which is an unstated but obvious goal of the project, the English videos could include subtitles in the subject’s native language, and the other language videos could provide English subtitles.

The site provides insight into the method utilized to build at least one of the resources, namely the immigration story videos that are collected.

The project maintains a clean and minimal interface reinforcing the objective of inviting more participants to contribute to the archive, while using links to the expansive IHRC resources, ensuring the viewer is made aware that the venture is part of a larger pedagogical initiative.

How are the collaborative aspects reflected in the project?

The best part of the project is the premise of enabling viewer participation in a way that allows them to contribute their stories in their own words and expand the archive. The technical guidance provided to the participants in the recording process is also a successful collaborative approach. The freely available archive and educational resources offer the potential of future collaborations with researchers and educators.

Do you see an opportunity for collaboration that would be helpful to the project?

The collaborative aspect of viewer participation can be strengthened by incorporating a more tangible sense of community. Currently, the connection feels a little impersonal since the entire process is conducted electronically, probably using standard mechanical language. There is an opportunity to expand the project's reach by building an immigration support resource. This would help the participants feel like they are part of a larger community that is within reach, and they could also contribute to the construction of the support resource.