A Summary of Audience, Dialogue, and Co-Creation

In this past module I have learned concepts that will help me improve my final project in the upcoming weeks. For example, in the article, Creating a Dialogic Museum : The Chinatown History Museum Experiment by John Kuo Wei Tchen, I learned that it is not only important to know what the historical topics that you wish to show your audience but also how to engage and include them in the exhibit. Tchen discussed the importance of engaging the correct audience whether it’s Chinese New Yorkers, non-Chinese New Yorkers, East Side, Upper West Side, etc. To know your audience is to know how to engage them. Making it interactive will help in that idea and that’s why I am hoping to do a game for my final project.

The other two articles discussed how important and complex public engagement of an historical exhibit can be. The curators and/or historians of the exhibition have to make sure that everyone has a voice and it’s been heard. With a public history project, there should not necessarily be an “expert authority” in the sense that the “expert” is the only person making a contribution to the learning and understanding of the historical matter at hand.

How can I make my project not only historically accurate but provide an opportunity for the users to give their input as to what they know or might know what happened? Perhaps I can have a forum or chat in the game, perhaps I can have a contact me form where they fill out their information and what they wish to say? I’m still thinking on the best course but I know that that will be important to my project. Not only to tell them historically what happened but let their voices be heard.

I thought learning about personas was significantly important to not only learning about digital public history projects but also who your target audience should be. Without having a specified target audience, then you will be making software or a digital history project to the masses and it might not be received as well. Knowing who your audience could be, what they like and dislike, and how they might perceive your project is imperative when building any project.

I’m still trying to narrow my final project idea but after reading the readings and conducting interviews with people, it gave me a better sense of how I should make my project. My findings from those two interviews are detailed in my previous blog post. After I made two personas in the next activity based on what I gathered from my interviews, it became more clear to me that I need to ask myself what would [my persona’s name] do? This is what Schlomo Goltz and Erika Hall discussed in their respective articles. I learned how to not only conduct an interview that may be useful to my project from Hall but also how to analyze it from Goltz.

I hope that in the next week or so I can fine-tune my project so that the personas will be more helpful for me as I create this project. My goal is that my audience will want to participate in my game and also learn some history along the way.