You have been commissioned to build a
Virtual Museum of Asian American Women and Men for MIT. You must decide what will go into the museum and how the information/artifacts will be organized and presented. In creating this museum, you will be telling the story of Asian American history, but with an explicit emphasis on gender, race, and class issues. What kind of story will you tell in the museum?
Issues to think about:
Whose story is it?
Who is telling the story?
Will you arrange your information chronologically or by theme?
Will you group "Asian Americans" together or have separate exhibits for different subethnic groups? (Chinese American, Vietnamese American, South Asian American, etc.)
Will you focus on "famous" people or "ordinary" people?
How can you use oral history?
How will you use visuals, artifacts, and text together to present your information to the public?
Ideas for exhibits:
Timeline
"Top 100 APIs"
"A Day in the Life of..."
Individual Histories
Historical Photographs
Important Issues for Asian American Men and Women
This will be a class-wide project. You will work in small groups of 3-4 to create your part of the museum. The project is intended to fulfill some of the same purposes of both an exam and a term paper. That is, you should show comprehensive mastery of the material and issues covered during the term, and you should conduct some original, in-depth research on a focused area and produce a piece of written work based on this research. Each group should submit a project that is equivalent to a 30-40 page term paper, in terms of research, thoughtfulness of organization, originality and clarity of writing. In addition, each student will submit a short (1-2 page) essay at the close of the term, reflecting on what s/he learned through the experience of constructing the museum.
Work on the project will be spread throughout the term. Groups will be asked to bring in "pieces" of the museum in the coming weeks so we can monitor progress. By working at a steady pace, we can avoid the end of the semester crush. There will be class time every week to discuss your progress. A class assistant will be available to help get everything on-line, and answer any questions about the WWW or HTML.
Some Potential Sources:
history books
journal articles
literature
films
"Who's Who in Asian America"
magazines
Web
museum exhibition catalogs
photo archives
LIBRARIES (MIT, Harvard-Yenching Library, Boston Public Library)