As a case study for my project, I continued documenting my grandparents' history as Japanese immigrants to the United States at the turn of the century through their internment during World War II. Recording my family history turned out to be challenging and rewarding, surprising and ambiguous.
After conducting and transcribing interviews with three of four living relatives in my family, I discovered that the stories they told were the most enjoyable, memorable and poignant parts of the interviews. Names and dates were recalled with less accuracy while the anecdotal stories were remembered and recounted. My attention was draw to the more delightful stories: my grandmother chasing jackrabbits down on foot in the fields where she lived. my great-uncle's disappearance during WWWII.
I began to loosely visualize the stories I collected (interviews, photographs, documents) with other research on Japanese American history (historical information and artifacts as context).
Part of this process involved me working on some quick visuals of the stories. I gave myself some constraints:
Ink + paper
Text + image
10 minutes only, one sheet a day