This week, my work for Greenwood is a little light because I’m currently spending this week and next at the 2023 Veterans Legacy Program Institute in St. Augustine. However, I am very pleased to be able to share some preliminary data from the survey I’ve been discussing. Since it was decided by my supervisor and her team that this survey should not be sent out far and wide to the general public, I’ve sent it to my own family, friends, and grad school cohort. This does present some challenges, as it has led the results to be slightly skewed, but I have also asked my friends to invite their parents and teenage children to take the survey as well, so hopefully, this will provide some balance to the final data.
The questions asked were developed using survey questions from Rosenzweig and Thelen’s survey featured in The Presence of the Past and the recent American Historical Association survey as mentioned last week. Additionally, I also added in some questions that are more tailored to Greenwood to gauge the public’s interest and existing knowledge in Orlando history and more specifically Greenwood Cemetery history.
So far, some very interesting results are coming in! Of those surveyed, 83.3% have visited Greenwood Cemetery, none of those have taken a walking tour previously, and 100% of respondents wished they knew more about Orlando’s history. In addition, I also asked some questions relating to what types of themed tours would be of interest to the public. Most of these responses are not a surprise, for example, the top tour theme request is “spooky stories.” However, write-in suggestions have indicated that there would be interest in a “queer history” themed tour and a tour geared toward kids as well, which are not ideas that I had on my list. This is exactly the kind of public input that I was looking for! All in all, this survey is doing exactly what I wanted it to; providing me a baseline for where the public is at, so I can meet them there and help Greenwood Cemetery achieve their goals of bringing Orlando’s history in the cemetery to the forefront.
I am also attempting to continue laying out my entries to begin writing the Clio tour narratives this week after my work at the VLP Institute each evening. It has been decided that it would be best to keep the entries to the already determined eight main stops, with multiple topics on each stop. While it would make it easier down the road if every topic had its own stop and Clio entry that could then be combined in multiple different tours, it’s just unfortunately too impractical as that would be over thirty stops! It would mean that to complete this one general tour, I would have to write thirty individual essays to input as entries in Clio! For practical purposes, there is just simply no way to complete the deliverable that I’ve been asked to create in that way. The positive about the chosen method is that while the information in each entry for individual topics will be briefer, it will allow for any future tours that might discuss that topic to touch on something new, or expand on what was in previous narratives. This will allow for visitors to take many themed tours without feeling that the same information is just replicated over and over.
That’s all for now! Time to get back to the Veterans at St. Augustine National Cemetery!
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