First Days Project (review)

With over 450 stories, the First Days Project delivers a glimpse of the twentieth century immigrant experience to an online audience, unassumingly sharing immigrants' stories of their first days in the United States. Created by the South Asian American Digital Archive organization (SAADA), the project aims to "reflect the diversity of the American immigrant experience" through a "diversity of stories." Although the stories are gathered from people who departed from locations throughout the world, the current plurality of narrators are originally from India. Since 2013, the project creators and partnering organizations (Global Nation from PRI, KBCS at Bellevue College, LatimerNOW, NBC News Asian America, The Seattle Globalist, and Swarthmore College Libraries) have sought to fill a void in United States history, gathering stories of immigrants' first days as they had not yet been "collected, preserved, and shared with others" through any systematic process. The website, First Days Project, begins to build a collection of sources from the immigrants' first perspectives.

Each story is organized on several levels accommodating both visual and text-based modes of discovery and allowing multiple points of entry into the collection. Stories are marked on a map of the political states of the world, where hovering over a country reveals the number of stories from people who departed from said state. Unfortunately, this map does not link to the stories sorted into country categories (at least in this reviewer's Google Chrome web browser). First Days Project also provides a visual timeline of many stories spanning from 1939 to 2018, with the stories from each year linked to the visualization. The index of stories, a text-based organization, lists each story alphabetically by narrator's last name, with links to their story. Perhaps the most accessible organization structure of the material, though, is the site's "Gallery of Stories." Organized in tiles with an image, narrator name, and statement about departure or arrival, users can filter the gallery by departure country, arrival state, and year of immigration. These entry points offer a variety of ways to access the rich collection of stories, but the gallery most successfully allows for sorting and selecting from the diverse experiences.

The First Days Project creators' collection of brief (typically two to four minute recordings or several hundred written words) immigration stories offer a perspective often overlooked by Americans today. As the country grapples with the politics of immigration, many forget the reality each immigrant has faced on their first hours in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar customs, people, and surroundings. Fear, excitement, and many other emotions expressed through these immigrant stories provide insights into these first experiences of the unknown. For example, having departed in 1965 from Kollam, India, Basil Varkey came to the United States with a single piece of luggage on his first airplane flight. When he arrived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the cold, snowy air shocked Basil. His first day was a whirlwind tour of the hospital he would be working at with new systems and unfamiliar food. Near the end, collecting his thoughts, Basil reflected on both the "anxiety and excitement" of the coming days. For US-born residents and immigrants (or potential immigrants) alike, the collected first day stories express a diversity of experiences.

By gathering memories from immigrants from around the world, SAADA seeks to fill a void in the histories of US immigration, relying on firsthand accounts of these primary actors. Each story is a primary source of an individual's migration experience that may have been gathered by the organization's volunteer reporters, through interviews with narrators conducted by SAADA's partner organizations, or uploaded as crowdsourced personal submissions. Stories take the form of audio or video recordings, interview transcripts, or first person written accounts. As very personal accounts, first day interviews and personal submissions of first day stories grant listeners and readers a glimpse at individual narratives of a momentous, and perhaps arduous, day. As primary sources, the First Days Project stories provide evidence of...