Week 1: Re-Introduction

      Hello, my name is Hiram Davila. I am in my second year at UCF in the History Master's program, and I am extremely excited to begin a new internship. My current research interests regard the early modern Spanish Empire, particularly the Spanish Inquisition. This blog will be acting as my journal week-by-week as I intern with the city of Orlando and Greenwood Cemetery throughout the Fall 2024 semester.

    With my new internship, I will be working under another UCF Master's student, Sarah Boye, and will be assisting her with processing data from a recent History Harvest. This data includes oral histories, scanned documents, newspapers, and more. Much of this data will be inputted to the UCF RICHES digital collection. Coincidentally, my previous internship during my undergraduate (which I also have a blog about) was with RICHES, so I am pretty familiar with the different assignments that I will be dealing with this semester.

    To talk more about my assignments, I will be transcribing, creating A/V logs, and filling out metadata for oral histories. All of these tasks I have done before at my time with RICHES, and I am happy that I am able to continue to improve both of those skills this semester at Greenwood Cemetery. Additionally, I will be creating metadata for objects, documents, etc. that were collected at the Greenwood Cemetery history harvest.

    Both tasks I am excited for because I want my main focus this semester to improving my metadata skills. Although my focus is on traditional history and not public history, I enjoy the metadata entry side of public history projects. What I have come to find out from working and hearing about different public and digital history projects is that bottlenecking can occurs because of metadata entry. It certainly can be tedious work that has specific guidelines to follow and needs to be done so that the data can be more easily accessed by the public. I hope to hone that skill this semester though the work I do with Greenwood Cemetery, and I will be documenting all my progress in this blog. 

    On top of those assignments, I have more fun side projects that I may be a part of, or at least will be able to see come to fruition, such as a podcast. I am also a part of another public history project at UCF called the Florida France Soldiers Stories project, which I may mention some weeks if the work I do there overlaps or helps me improve my work at Greenwood Cemetery. All in all, I am well immersed in the world of public history this semester and I am excited to be sharing parts of that world to others through this blog post.