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Oral histories of Korean Americans depict cross-cultural and transnational experiences. The oral interviews of first-generation, 1.5, and second-generation Korean Americans add to the importance of collecting such oral histories in order to document and share them with the public. Most Korean Americans have a close connection to South Korea. Their Korean heritage is stressed in their challenges and successes of living and/or growing up in America. Korean Americans have contributed to education, workforce, economy, medicine, religion, politics, and the arts in the United States. Despite their efforts, information about their contributions is not shared nationwide. Hence, there should be a website that provides public access to information about Korean American history and culture. In order to achieve this goal, a digital humanities website that is comprised of oral interviews, images, descriptions, narratives, maps, timeline, and crowdsourcing is in progress. As a Digital Humanities scholar, I emphasize the mentioned elements by creating a user-friendly website for public access while preserving and documenting Korean American history and culture for current and future generations. According to the editors of Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement, “we now have incredible technologies that can disseminate oral history to a global audience almost instantaneously” (Boyd and Larson 2014). This results in a perfect combination of oral history and digital humanities. Tracing Korean American history and culture from the 1960s to present on a digital platform provides insight into the different lives of Korean Americans and their ties to Korea while highlighting their cross-cultural and transnational experiences in oral interviews.

Oral history has a long tradition in human societies, capturing the stories of people, places and times, using the recollections and experience of witnesses. As an academic discipline, it has been fruitful in capturing the details of those important stories for analysis, feeding into historical and sociological research. Yet some academic researchers continue to regard oral history as not always factually accurate thus down playing its evidentiary value. Our experience departs from this view. Oral history brings its own truth to our understanding of how a culture has been made. It brings the kind of texture that raw facts cannot supply. And it brings an emotional dimension only possible when someone speaks in their own voice of their own experience. This leads simply to the conclusion that these important oral histories should be published and enjoyed by the wider community and not just languish out of view. Cultural Conversations is a collaboration involving artists, critics, authors, cinematographers, translators and IT experts, in building an online living archive of the stories of eminent Australian and South Korean visual artists. The online archive is freely available to the international audience via bespoke technology developed by the Australia Centre for Oral History. This paper will discuss the research leading up to the bespoke technology behind the Cultural Conversations collaboration, showing its support for multiple parallel synchronised channels of communication delivered through a standard web browser, delivering synchronised video, audio, images and text in a way that allows the user to select the channels most applicable to them at the time. Our usage statistics, nearly 120,000 international visitors between April 2018 and March 2019, is indicative of the efficacy of our approach. In addition, the archive has been accessioned by the Pandora/Trove facility at the National Library of Australia as a significant Australian cultural web site.