While Dia de los Muertos is customarily a time to celebrate loved ones who've died, the Oakland Museum's new online project is bringing new life to the widely celebrated tradition.

The new Dia los Muertos online exhibition is a multimedia online gallery and complete social network where members can create profiles, share experiences and discuss upcoming events. The project is overseen by Senior Curator Rene de Guzman and Marketing Manager Adam Rozan and directed by guest curators Isaias Rodriguez and Aide Rodriguez.

With the museum closed for renovations and unable to host it's annual Dia de los Muertos celebration, the staff looked online and brought in guest curators who were not only artists and connected to the community, but who were also experience in the virtual world.

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"They basically came up with the idea of a having it be a social network because day of the dead is about community" explained de Guzman. "And with all the social networking going on we felt that we could build a huge community around it." The site was officially launched on Oct. 30 and has so far registered 130 members. 

De Guzman says the network took about a month to complete and functions like a heavily interactive, multimedia travelogue. The narrative follows the curators, along with the museum's cultural arts developer Evelyn E. Orantes Palacios, as they travel through California and Mexico investigating how the Day of the Dead is celebrated in various regions. There's a full library of video interviews, over 200 photos and even a few reality TV style personal diaries. 

Members are encouraged to join in the conversation by sharing their own content and participating in regular projects like listing your ideal last meal or uploading the song you'd like played as you take your final bow.

"We invited the community to share and what we're finding is that people from all across the country are sharing and giving feedback" Rozan says. "Their recent travels, images that they've collected the year before, and they're commenting and posting their upcoming events. So clearly it's becoming this catchall."

The social network is a part of the museum's larger online strategy and several areas of the permanent collection are in the process of getting the multimedia makeover.  There's a new focus on building a virtual community and a full court press on social media, with growing followers on the museum's Facebook, Twitter and Flickr pages.

Rozan elaborated on their new digital philosophy. "We want to keep expanding and in the future, as these new avenues to communicate are developed online we're going to keep up with that. We're allowing the public to say what they think and that pipeline's really fascinating, that back and forth."

About Kwan Booth

Kwan Booth is the co founder and Sr. Community Manager for Oakland Local. A West Oakland resident, Booth is also a creative writer, media consultant and cultural curator. He was recently a recipient of the Society of Professional Journalist’s Sigma Delta Chi award for a series on air quality and health issues in West Oakland. He writes at Boothism.com