Week 13: Transcripts and Showcases

  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 was a return to normalcy after my long-winded fight with Adobe Acrobat. I returned to working on transcripts, which I have already written quite extensively about in the beginning weeks of this semester as well as my previous blog during my internship with RICHES in 2023.On top of working on the transcripts, however, I also began working on my PowerPoint presentation for the work that I have done in the internship and with Sarah.

    I reached out to Sarah regarding some interesting topics that I can bring up, not just strictly looking at my work as an intern, but also use the presentation to highlight the research her and others are doing at Greenwood that I may not be a part of. This decision to talk to her about these other histories comes after going on her guided walking tour of Jonestown, Orlando's first African American community that was incorporated into the Greenwood Cemetery. 

    Sarah was able to provide me with great resources that are not only helping me create the presentation for the Intern Showcase, but also for my final historiographic paper that is due at the end of the semester. Reflecting on that final assignment, I was quite lost for what I should write about. I have been mainly listening to oral histories most of the weeks, and I struggled to find a large correlation between the oral histories and the overall history of Greenwood. 

    Sarah's guided walking tour, however, proved to be special. In terms of the internship showcase, it provided a different avenue to talk about the project by describing "hidden histories" that are held within the Cemetery. These include things like the history of Jonestown, scars from the Ocoee Massacre, Sunland Hospital, and a "secret" Confederate monument that is housed at Greenwood. I will be describing the transcriptions, metadata, and the A/V logs in my presentation for the showcase, but this extra information does a great job of showcasing what the Greenwood Project is about and I hope gets people interested in the work Sarah is doing. 

    Lastly, I think my historiographical paper will focus on these hidden histories. As I followed Sarah's virtual walking tour she created for Greenwood, I realized that I can use some of the spots she talks about and relate them to my work. For example, in one oral history a man talks about playing in a field next to the cemetery which he later found out was called Babyland and connected to the Sunland Hospital. Both Babyland and the Sunland Hospital are a stop in Sarah's tour. I can see her sources and reconstruct the history of these places while also explaining how my involvement with the Greenwood project led me to these histories. I am still trying to refine it, but the resources Sarah has shared with me is pointing me in the right direction.