The week has only just begun, but I wanted to provide an update after the Florida Historical Society 2023 Annual Meeting and Symposium this past weekend. I am happy to report that my poster on the Greenwood Cemetery digital walking tour project was well received and my session was quite well attended overall compared to my experience last year.
I had several individuals speak to me about the digital methods I've used during the project so far, which was fun for me since that's not something that people usually talk to me about. I also was able to network with Dr. Lester who is currently working on a project with RICHES at UCF about Jonestown. Dr. Lester suggested that we pool our research which I am more than happy to do! I won't be working on Jonestown again for a little while yet, but I am looking forward to having any help her team can provide as well as helping them in whatever way that I can. I received possibly my favorite comment ever on my work during my session. Another graduate student said to their friend "Wow, she's like a REAL historian!" I'm going to live off of that praise for a long time! And finally, I was able to speak at length to Sebastian Garcia of the UCF Knights HistoryCast Podcast who has agreed to do a podcast series before the launch of the completed tour in June. We discussed the style we're both envisioning for the "true crime" style podcast that will reveal some of the more interesting components of the Wilmott family's story. We both agreed that an engaging, narrative-style podcast about the Wilmott murder trial and other dramatic and tragic stories relating to them would be a great way to pull in visitors to the cemetery and drive interest in the digital tour.
In other news, my intern is nearing the end of his originally assigned tasks and felt so confident about completing them that he requested another research subject to tackle before the end of the semester! I was more than happy to grant that request and he found an excellent subject to research that will add a new individual to the tour topic list. He's chosen a WWII Veteran who died in France two days after D-Day. He was originally buried where he died but was reinterred in 1948 with another local Orlando Veteran. Their funeral was attended by 400 local residents at Greenwood Cemetery. I'm very happy to have added another military story and a time period that was lacking from the original tour topic list. There are so many stories in the cemetery, that it would be nearly impossible to cover them all, but this addition gets us just a little bit closer!
I'm still hoping this week to make a trip to the West Oaks Library for some hands-on research and I've also planned a field trip for my intern at the Greenwood on Friday so we can take some photos of our topics from this semester. This is the time of year when things start getting extra busy, so I plan to go into organization mode after I complete that last bit of hands-on research as I ease myself into writing mode. With any luck, my writing will go similarly to last semester where I was able to knock out drafts of my essays fairly quickly and then focus on editing them and posting them to Clio. I do plan to leave two entries out of the expanded proof-of-concept tour because they should (hopefully) be rather big news when they're revealed. I don't want to steal any thunder from the ultimate reveal of the final tour this coming summer by letting the cat out of the bag too early. I may, however, attempt to do a good solid draft of them both to share with my supervisors by the end of the semester.
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