This is the final week of this semester's internship with Greenwood Cemetery. I haven't accomplished anything groundbreaking since last week's update, but I do have a few things I wanted to reflect on in this last blog post.
Primarily, the focus of this week has been writing my historiographical and methodological paper on the digital tools and methods I used during the semester and creating my presentation for the Internship Showcase on Friday. These final assignments were a great way to reflect on the tools and methods that I've used, especially the surveys that I developed to gauge the audience for the digital walking tour. As I've written about previously, the two surveys that guided my own were Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen's The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life and Pete Burkholder and Dana Shaffer's newer study titled History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey. These two studies really helped me evaluate where the Orlando public is, and how best to meet them there.
One of my biggest challenges as an academic historian is learning to bridge the gap between the academy and the public in this work. Thankfully, this internship has given me ample practice in this aspect of my career development! Other skills I've been able to hone during the semester include working with digital tools hands-on, creating deliverables for a client (in this case, my supervisor), and project managing all aspects of this process. I've been very fortunate in having a great deal of freedom in researching and developing the proof of concept tour. I'm sure my experiences won't always be this way, but I certainly have enjoyed it!
While the final "real" digital walking tour is many months off, I'm so pleased that I was able to dive in and test the waters like this so that I know what I can do and where the project might be headed. I'm very much looking forward to continuing my work with Greenwood Cemetery and I'm extremely excited about finding an undergraduate intern to work alongside me. I'm hopeful that the work the two of us can accomplish together will create a finished product that can truly impress the cemetery, the City of Orlando, and our audience.
I'll leave you with one last image of the cemetery which will be among the first of my next research projects at Greenwood; the Weeks Mausoleum.
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