This is a rather bittersweet entry as it will be the last of my internships! Though I'll be continuing my work with Greenwood Cemetery, this portion of my education is coming to an end. I'll do my best to sum up the past few weeks and give a bit of a preview for what's ahead.
During Thanksgiving break, I continued to work on editing my undergraduate intern's entries and I added three of his and two of mine to the original Clio proof-of-concept tour. You can view that here. I will be submitting this extended sample tour along with the poster I designed and presented at the Florida Historical Society Annual Meeting and Symposium as an alternative assignment to the final paper for this internship. I also finished writing my first ever academic journal article proposal for an upcoming special issue of The Public Historian on cemeteries, graveyards, and massacres. I'm very hopeful that my proposal will be accepted because I think the work we're doing with Greenwood Cemetery will make an excellent report from the field to discuss the transition of a municipal cemetery to a historic site during a time when telling potentially "divisive" history is particularly challenging.
My intern and I met over the break to work on our final presentation for the Internship Showcase this coming Friday. I'm extremely pleased to say that he would like to continue working with me on the digital walking tour which will make the next few months considerably easier for me! Currently, we have seven remaining tour entries to complete the "core" tour and after meeting with my supervisor before the break began, we will be focusing additional efforts on completing one themed tour, specifically, the African American history tour. This tour will use several entries from the core tour and incorporate additional topics. I have not settled on the exact number of entries for the themed tours, but I believe it will be between ten to twelve. The research is complete for several of the remaining core entries and I plan to buckle down and get them written before the start of the spring semester. Those that remain will be divided between myself and my current intern. With any luck, compiling a sample themed tour will allow for more grant opportunities to fund future work. In addition to keeping my existing intern on staff, I hope to hire a new intern next semester to help with another aspect of the project that I think could benefit from another set of hands. This intern's assignment will be primarily to assist me in the development, administration, and marketing of a heritage harvest event to engage with the community as well as solicit oral histories and physical artifacts from the public relating to Greenwood and the individuals buried there. I plan to have both my current and new intern complete the necessary CITI training to conduct oral history interviews so that I have a small team to make the event possible. I may even try to work with a class at UCF to obtain a few volunteers if we get enough public interest and find we'll need more interviewers. I am also hoping that this intern can help us develop a marketing plan to make sure the public knows about the tour when it launches. Part of this plan that I've already been working on with the producer of the Knights HistoryCast podcast at UCF is a limited series podcast about the Wilmott family which I think will greatly interest the public!
There's so much more to say, but I will have to end this post here. Hopefully, I find time to come back and post updates on the project. I'll leave you with pictures of some highlights over the last two semesters of my work at Greenwood Cemetery.
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