Week 2: Transcripts and Presentation of Information

    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 share some information about my internship this semester. 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 the conclusion of my second week, the similarities between what I am doing in my current internship and what I did with RICHES in 2023 is very evident. This week I spent most my time working on making a transcript and A/V log of an oral history that was done by the cemetery. To begin, I looked back at my previous correspondence with Geoffrey Cravero when I worked at RICHES. The transcripts that I will be working on for the Greenwood Cemetery are ultimately going to be added into the RICHES database. Looking back at my emails, I found the template that I used back in my 2023 internship and got permission to use the template with the oral histories moving forward. The template itself is nothing too special, but it does give great tips on some transcription guidelines such as how to write a proper time stamp, how to write numbers in certain situations, as well as putting special indicators when the topic of the discussion is changing. These tid-bits that are within the template helped me get over the procrastination of starting the transcription as well as helping me be more efficient. 

    Something important that I want to bring up aside from the actual work is highlighting how different projects have different ways of organizing their tasks. With RICHES, I only knew what tasks I was going to do when I talked with Dr. Lester or message Mr. Cravero about what I need/should be doing. A benefit to that approach is that I only had one thing to focus on, so it made it easier for me to lock in on that specific goal, but I also had no idea of what I would be doing next and had no sense of how the work I was doing helped in the broader scheme of the project. The two projects that I am a part of now are similar in the fact that I have dedicated drives or files that I can look into to see what I need to be doing, but they both do it in a different way. For this internship, I joined at Microsoft Team which had the files that I needed laid out with a set of instructions about what was expected of me. It was very straight forwards and did not need much more explaining. After talking with Sarah, my supervisor, I was also able to be flexible with the work I am doing this semester since I can see everything that needs to be done. On the other hand, I am a research assistant with UCF's FFSS project. The way the information was given to me in regards to what I am supposed to do came from both meetings with the team as well as a very vast file. For FFSS, I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of information that was stored in the files that I needed to sift through to adequately start the work that was expected of me. 

    While the presentation of the information that I am working with may be out of the scope of this blog and most of my audience (who I would presume are Dr. French and students), it is something that I hope public history projects and people who work with interns are more attentive to. The way that a project distributes tasks they want interns to do and how this information is given, can effect the work the intern does. While I may be weird and this was a far-out observation, this is my blog and I found this difference between the three projects rather interesting. Next week, I hope to finish up more of the transcript as well as begin writing some of the metadata to get a head start with that, as that would be my next goal after completing the transcription.