What it is
Golden Hour tells Asian and Asian American stories through film, data and civic history. It brings several projects under one roof: a guide to Asian films where heroes take on Western empires and racists, an atlas of the real uprisings behind those films, data stories about representation in Hollywood, a map of Los Angeles's Asian American neighborhoods, an explainer on redistricting, and more.
Each project has its own look and its own subject, but they share one idea: these stories are worth telling carefully, with the sources in plain view, so readers can check every claim and go further on their own.
How it's made
Every project starts with research: reading the films, reports, archives and public datasets, then writing original summaries and deciding how the material should be organized and shown. The research, writing and design decisions are human work. The sites themselves are built with AI coding tools, which turn those decisions into working pages.
The whole site is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no build step, no backend and no logins. Content lives in data files, so updating a project means editing its data, not its code. The scripts that clean and assemble the data are kept alongside each project, so any figure can be traced back to where it came from.
Methods and ground rules
- Every number has a source and a date. Figures are stored next to the name and link of their source and the date they were checked, and shown that way on the page.
- No guessing about identity. A person or business is only counted as Asian American or AAPI when a public source says so: their own statements, a reputable profile, or a published study's classification. Race and ethnicity are never inferred from names, photos or surnames.
- Official and research sources first. Census data, city open data and university studies come before aggregators.
- Site terms are respected. Sites whose terms forbid scraping are cited by hand rather than scraped; official APIs are used where they exist.
- Original writing. Summaries are written in our own words. Articles, reviews and synopses are linked, not copied.
- Images are credited. Images are used only when their license allows it, and each one is credited with its source.
The projects
Live projects open from the links below; the others are being built and will appear as they're ready. Each project's own About page lists its sources and methods in full.
Credits
- Film posters: Posters from TMDB. This site is not endorsed by TMDB.
- Atlas map: coastlines and borders from Natural Earth, a public-domain map dataset.
- Type: Fraunces and Instrument Sans, served by Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License.
- Screenshots on the homepage are of Golden Hour's own projects.
- Analytics: visitor counts will come from Cloudflare Web Analytics, which works without cookies and doesn't collect personal data.
- Film titles, names and trademarks belong to their owners. Golden Hour is an independent project and is not affiliated with any studio, distributor or organization it mentions.