Week 5: One Last Set Back

   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.

    This week, I did not get done as much as I would have liked. My goal was to finish the transcription this week, finish up with some of the minor details that needed to be fixed, such as adding indicators and time stamps when major topics are being brought forwards, and to begin the editing process. I was hoping that next week I would finish with the transcript completely, editing and all, and devote the rest of my time to finishing the metadata sheet on the transcript.

    In my mind, the metadata should not take too much time. The goal for next week was again to finish the transcript as well as finish the metadata so that I can begin looking at the objects and other physical artifacts that were brought in during the history harvest. I have learned from both doing transcripts again for Greenwood and reminiscing from my time at RICHES that transcripts are not my forte. I am able to do them and I have a good understanding of the process of creating one, but I am a person who works a lot better when I have small markers to measure my progress. With metadata, I feel accomplished by completing a box in the spreadsheet. With transcripts, I do not have that feeling until I am done with at least the first draft, which in this case is after over an hour of transcribing. 

    Even though I did not do all that I hoped for this week, I was not distracted by my own procrastination. I had an excuse that ties in with Greenwood! On top of just having a busy week with my other commitments, the Florida Digital Humanities held their 10th Anniversary Consortium Conference on Thursday and Friday that I attended. The conference was a gathering of digital historians around Florida that were presenting both on their DH projects, as well as showcasing future technology and implications. The keynote session on Thursday was about AI, the moral panic that has come with it, and how we as educators and in DH need to be leaders to help guide our collogues with this new and disruptive technology. I also attended a few more panels that focused on just currently research projects. I went to one put on by a panel of UNF academics who created the Eartha M. M. White VR Experience and went into detail about how this project went from a collection of documents in their archive and a museum of her house into a virtual-scape that is being used by instructors at UNF and elsewhere. They talked about accessibility, the hardware and software they used, as well as what they did to confront the question of ethics when working in VR. 

    The panels that I went to and experienced were all very interesting, well crafted, and began making me think about how I could create my own DH project, even though I am a history track student. If you are interested more about some of the panels I viewed, I will be making another blogpost next week (it will be in this blog space instead, not here) where that is my main focus.