Hello, everyone! I’m Mansi Patel and I’m excited to share the progress of my project, Exploring the Journey of Asian Women in STEM at ISU. This project is part of the Tracing Race at ISU initiative, focusing on digital scholarship and the experiences of Asian women in STEM at ISU through oral history interviews. My motivation for this project comes from my family background and the influence of strong women in my life. This initiative aligns perfectly with my interests and background in the STEM field. I have always been driven by stories and this project is another example of storytelling as an inspiration medium.

In the first phase during the Summer of 2023, I conducted oral history interviews with Asian women faculty members at ISU. I’ve completed 6 interviews representing various STEM disciplines. Then in the same phase of the project, a WordPress website was built to put the content out there available to the public. Currently this spring semester, I’m working on phase 2 creating a multimedia website with the integration of Oral History as a Data tool to showcase these interviews and related content in a more accessible way. I’ve received additional funding to further develop the interview data. Introducing the Oral History as Data (OHD) tool has been a significant step forward. This tool helps me effectively analyze and publish coded oral history or qualitative interview files. As a result, users can enjoy a more interactive viewing experience. This second phase uses a lot more technical skills, one of the tasks involves analyzing the transcript using topic modeling to identify and extract the major topics covered during the conversations. An additional step is utilizing GitHub and coding to transfer data from the existing site to a new site integrated with OHD.

As per the progress of the project, I’m thrilled to share that I’ve completed cleaning and uploading transcripts to the OHD project Git repository. My current focus is on building individual pages for each faculty member and transferring data from the WordPress website to the new OHD site. While it’s still early, I’ve gathered some insightful findings from the interviews using topic modeling and coded the transcript. The project has already had a positive impact on both the participants and the ISU community. The enthusiastic response received during the ISCORE conference presentation is a testament to this. Looking ahead, my focus is on finalizing the individual pages for faculty information and working with the Tracing Race team at the ISU library to transfer the design template from WordPress. Working on this project has significantly expanded my knowledge pool. Not only have my interactions with the faculty members I interviewed been informative but also building this project from the ground up has greatly contributed to my analytical and technical skillset.

In conclusion, my project is making steady progress toward showcasing the journeys of Asian women in STEM at ISU. I’m excited about the future possibilities and the impact my work can have in this field of digital scholarship.