Week 7: Presentation and Hurricane Milton

    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 is (hopefully) the last week that I will be behind on one of these updates for the semester. I waited a little bit longer to have something to update on since my previous blogpost was so late into the week. I should be able to more steadily provide meaningful updates from here on out.

    One of the major hurdles, however, is the impending hurricane that is supposed to hit Central Florida. As a UCF student, we have already been advised that school will be closed from Tuesday (10/8) to Thursday (10/10). Having been through the destruction that Hurricane Helene just a few weeks ago when I went with my family to help a friend from Northern Florida/Southern Georgia, I am very nervous about Milton. I can only imagine how bad it can be. There was also another hurricane that hit UCF while I was here a few years ago and I was out of power for almost a week and I remember terrible flooding and parking lots at apartment complexes with cars completely washed away. Suffice to say, I am very cautious. I have plans to be leaving the state and evacuating come Tuesday morning. I will be taking about a 6 hour trip to South Carolina to hopefully weather the storm. I hope and pray that everyone that stays is safe and is preparing properly now and that I will have a home to come back to after everything is said and done. 

    Moving onto my PowerPoint that I have been working on, I have done a lot of work on it. I was given a very official-looking UCF VHP template that really makes this part of my internship feel influential to students. Through creating this PowerPoint, I have been able to explore the VHP project, or what is now the CVHP project, as it was not a digital history project I worked on before. My only really experience with UCF DH projects are RICHES (which VHP is a part of) and FFSS. Seeing the master files and the inter-workings of VHP is interesting when I compare it to something like FFSS or my time at RICHES, where there was no master file for me to see at all since my work was filtered through someone else. 

    There is a bit more to add to the PowerPoint, but a majority of the content that we are going over (such as A/V logs and transcripts), are already covered in videos created by Jessie Oldham, which I have added into the presentation. What I need to add is more screenshots of the master-file to help the students follow along with me, as well as a bit more information I want to add about filling out an abstract. My next blog post, I may add some of the screenshots of the slides I created in it, but I will more than likely be showing off most the PowerPoint at UCF's internship fair at the end of the semester.