Website: http://kfl.humnet.ucla.edu/map
Principal Investigator(s): Prof. Tim Tangherlini, Scandinavian
The Korean/Korean American Online Folklore Archive is a tool envisioned by Professor Tangherlini and developed by programmers at HumTech to train students in the practices of folklore/ethnographic fieldwork. Students enrolled in his classes collect and document cultural expressive forms from members of Los Angeles’ Korean-American community, and then enter that data into the online folklore archive. All of the data in the archive is wedded to significant meta-data describing the collectors, the consultants/informants, the collection contexts and the field data itself. In the long run, the data that Tim and his students have collected (and continue to collect) will be a valuable reference for anyone studying the history of the Korean-American community of the greater Los Angeles area.
The current project will add two new features to the application. First, we are planning to add the ability to store supporting media files, such as audio and video, in an external file system, such as Box, rather than on its application server. This will reduce the server requirements to run the application. Second, we will be building in more detailed reporting systems about the overall usage of the application. The long-term goal of both of these upgrades is to make the application available to and useful to any scholar working on, or teaching a class that engages with, folkloric traditions.