About

The Project

Digitizing Historic Wintersburg is a digital heritage preservation project that aims to preserve the physical footprint of the Historic Wintersburg community. Historic Wintersburg is a rare surviving example of land owned by Japanese Americans from 1908- 2004. The Furuta family first purchased the property shortly before the enactment of the Alien Land Laws, which prohibited ethnic minorities from owning land. By studying Japanese American pioneers of Orange County, Digitizing Historic Wintersburg addresses pre-World War II Japanese American history. It specifically explores the impact that Japanese American farmers had on the development of Orange County within the context of 20th-century immigration policies, labor practices, and discrimination embedded in these systems.

Historic Wintersburg is an important site of Japanese American heritage and is in desperate need of a digital form of preservation. On February 25, 2022, a fire destroyed the one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old manse. Later, the 1910 Wintersburg Japanese Mission, one of the oldest Japanese missions in Orange County, was also demolished. Digitizing Historic Wintersburg offers a feasible and sustainable option to protect in digital form what remains of this historic site from future destruction.

This project is inspired by scholarly conversations about the social constructions of space and the various meanings that places hold for different community members. These discussions are shaped across multiple disciplines, which include ethnic studies, cultural geography, urban anthropology, public history, and digital history. For example, human geographer Tim Cresswell uses the term “place-making” to describe the creation of community gardens by immigrants living in Manhattan. These community gardens became meaningful spaces that embodied an identity that represented the community. Additionally, anthropologist Setha Low argues that spatial analysis of community-based spaces reveals social inequalities and exclusion through her study of food vendors within the Moore Street Market area located in Brooklyn, New York. An initial step in addressing histories of inequity is acknowledgment. John Kuo Wei Tchen, a historian, founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and co-founder of the Museum of Chinese America, advocates a dialogue-driven approach that recognizes and promotes understanding of different and shared experiences among members of the community. Digital spatial preservation offers an alternative form of engagement. In her research on historic sites of African diaspora, public and digital historian Jamila Moore Pewu discusses the use of digital technologies to digitally map or remap endangered historic sites. Pewu defines “spatial fluency” as the idea that spaces hold multiple meanings for different community members and that these meanings influence perceptions of the past, present, and future. The digital heritage preservation of Historic Wintersburg is centered on the relationship between place and space while protecting the endangered material culture of the site.

Digitizing Historic Wintersburg makes the physical space of Historic Wintersburg digitally accessible to the public. It invites public conversations about the history of Historic Wintersburg, its relation to current debates surrounding immigration, labor, and housing, and its connection to members of the community today.

Project Phases

As an ongoing digital heritage preservation project, Digitizing Historic Wintersburg will develop in phases. The first phase of the project consists of an inventory of digitized and born-digital assets. These assets include videos of the site’s footprint and environment, a virtual map of the Japanese American pioneering community of Orange County in the early twentieth century, an interactive timeline of the Furuta family at Historic Wintersburg, archival images, digitized historical documents, and oral histories. The data collection for this project represents a small but growing compilation of information that will inform the development of Digitizing Historic Wintersburg. The next phase of the project includes the integration of digital assets into the production of digital experiences. Digitizing Historic Wintersburg looks forward to future collaborations with various organizations to enhance outreach to communities.

Methodology

Embedded in the physical space of Historic Wintersburg are layers of memories and meanings that highlight the different perspectives and experiences of people within this community. The spatial analysis of a contested space like Historic Wintersburg encourages discussions about missing narratives within local histories that may extend to a national scale and raises awareness of the social constructions that include and exclude certain members of a community. Digitizing Historic Wintersburg aims to present a more inclusive collection of data by relying on three modes of data collection to assemble this digital archive. One mode of data collection is acquired data or protected data that has been permitted to be used by the owners of that data. Another mode is captured data or data that has been made available to the public. The last mode of data collection is created data or data that has been uniquely created for this project. Categorization of the three modes of data collection was done to promote transparency and provide a clearer understanding of what data is freely available.

Digitizing Historic Wintersburg builds on the preservation efforts that have come before it. In 2012, the Historic Wintersburg Preservation Task Force was formed. The Task Force has prevented the demolition and sale of this endangered historic site. Since 2017, Preserve OC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation of the region’s heritage, has also been actively engaged with the preservation of Historic Wintersburg. Still, the site of Historic Wintersburg has remained inaccessible to the public. Digitizing Historic Wintersburg offers an alternative method of preservation that captures the space in its current state while making the physical space of the site accessible to the public. Virtual access to the site of Historic Wintersburg engages local community members to examine ways in which the space can benefit the community. Digital heritage preservation leads to a more inclusive and diverse representation of the region’s history.

Works Cited

Historic Wintersburg

Brigandi, Phil. “The Wintersburg Japanese Presbyterian Church.” OC Historyland. Accessed March 16, 2022.https://www.ochistoryland.com/wintersburgchurch.

Demark, Bradford Van, director. Our American Family: The Furutas. Legacy Media, 2019. 25 minutes. https://www.amazon.com/Our-American-Family/dp/B06VXWQX8N.

Densho. “Incarceration vs. Internment.” Terminology. Accessed March 16, 2022. https://densho.org/terminology/#incarceration.

Furuta, Ken, Dave Furuta, and Norman Furuta. “Furuta Family Farm.” Walk the Farm. Accessed March 16, 2022. https://www.walkthefarm.org/furuta-family-farm.

National Trust for Historic Preservation. “Historic Wintersburg.” National Treasures. Accessed March 16, 2022. https://savingplaces.org/places/historic-wintersburg#.YipYu3rMK2E.

Urashima, Mary F. Adams. Historic Wintersburg in Huntington Beach. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014.

Public History

Adair, Bill, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski. Letting Go? : Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011.

Baron, Christine. “One if by Land! Two if by River? Or, What if Everything You Thought You Knew were Wrong?” The History Teacher 43, no. 4 (August 2010): 605-613. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25740780.

Kunitsugu, Katsumi. “Remembering Little Tokyo on First Street.” In The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, by Dolores Hayden. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Lewinnek, Elaine, Gustavo Arellano, and Thuy Vo Dang. A People’s Guide to Orange County. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022.

Takaki, Ron. “The Making of Multicultural America.” In Asianweek. (December 2008). ProQuest. https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/making-multicultural-america/docview/367643052/se-2?accountid=9840.

Tchen, John Kuo Wei. “Creating a Dialogic Museum: Chinese Americans, Tourists, and the New York Chinatown History Project Experiment.” In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven Lavine, 285-321. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Weil, Stephen E. Making Museums Matter. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002.

Digital History

Alexander, Bryan. “Storytelling through Virtual Reality.” In The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media. Rev. ed. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2017.

Cresswell, Tim. Place: an Introduction. 2nd ed. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2015.

Low, Setha M. “Spatializing Culture: An Engaged Anthropological Approach to Space and Place (2014).” In Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place, 34-38. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.

Pewu, Jamila Moore. “Digital Reconnaissance: Re(Locating) Dark Spots on a Map.” In The Digital Black Atlantic, edited by Roopika Risam, and Kelly Baker Josephs, 108-120. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Author

I am Diana Chang, digital preservationist, researcher, and graduate student at California State University. I am the project director of Digitizing Historic Wintersburg. I was born in Dallas, Texas, but have spent most of my life in Orange County, California. I have a bachelor’s degree in Art from the University of California, Irvine, and a teaching credential from California State University, Fullerton. As I advance my career as a public and digital historian, I aspire to contribute to the historical preservation of local and ethnic histories through digital storytelling. I also have three cats: Alora, Magnus, and Lufy. All are great supporters of my work.