Bringing History to Life: Two Digital Projects for the California Migration Museum
The California Migration Museum preserves and shares the diverse stories of California’s immigrant communities. It serves as a platform for education, dialogue, and celebration and emphasizes the rich cultural diversity that shapes the state. In 2023/24, Spellerberg Associates collaborated with the Museum to design and develop two digital projects that advance this mission.
Migrant Footsteps: Immersive Audio Tour App
Migrant Footsteps hosts immersive audio walks and 360 videos, inviting users to the center of California’s migration stories. Accessible within the Museum’s app, each tour combines music, oral history, archival research, and augmented reality to take you on a multi-sensory walk through five San Francisco and Los Angeles neighborhoods. Tours are self-guided and free to download.
We developed the application for iOS and Android using Unity. We established a Prismic repository for content addition and configuration for each tour. After we created the first two tours and provided content management guidelines to the museum team, Museum staff could upload and edit all tours independently. We published the application on the Apple App and Google Play stores.
The result was an immersive walking tour experience that enriches visitor engagement with on-the-ground stories and offers Museum staff easy access to edit and modify the app in the future. The app saw 1,000 active sessions in the eight months since its launch, with users averaging 35 minutes within the app, which is about the length of the tours.
Melting Spots: Interactive Map of Immigrant Food
Melting Spots showcases San Francisco’s diverse immigrant food scene through an interactive food map. A paper version of the map drives visitors to the website, which features oral histories of notable dishes representing different immigrant communities, bringing the city’s culinary heritage to life.
The website needed to be mobile, desktop-friendly, and future-proofed to allow for updating content, and it should be able to live online in perpetuity with little maintenance. Our solution was to build the interface using React.js and Leaflet and the backend using Decap CMS. The application leverages custom hooks and state management to provide seamless navigation and a rich user experience across devices. We delivered the oral histories via YouTube video embeds to allow additional discoverability via that platform.
The interactive map was central to the “Melting Spots” campaign, which engaged over 55,000 people through the website and social media, with over 170,000 listens and views across all platforms. The Mueum’s user engagement data showed a broad reach, with 60% accessing from mobile devices and a strong focus on the 25-44 age group.
Collaboration & Results
Our process involved regular collaboration with the museum team. We created prototypes quickly and iterated consistently through beta versions for feedback throughout development. We used Airtable to track progress and manage feedback, including tracking bugs and feature requests. We also set up a GitHub organization for the Museum, with repositories for the project’s source code. This ensured full access and project ownership.
Our work with the California Migration Museum demonstrates how digital innovation enriches cultural experiences and makes history accessible. These projects invite users to explore California’s rich tapestry of immigrant narratives.
Credits
Alex Foster illustrated Melting Spots. For Spellerberg Associates: Marty Spellerberg was the interactive designer; Philip Ings developed the app, Trenisha Goslee developed the website, and Margaret Sternbergh was the project manager and interpretation specialist.
Posted October 2024