This week, I was able to meet with my supervisor and she filled me in a little about the grant and what that would mean for me. While I still haven’t gotten to read the actual grant, she told me that in addition to creating a “digital cemetery,” this grant is also meant to be used to create interpretative signage at Greenwood. This signage is specifically for certain areas such as the section that is home to burials from the Sunland Center, which was an institutional facility for individuals, specifically children, with profound disabilities between 1961 and 1985. We will be working with community groups, like the Center for Independent Living, to create the verbiage for these interpretative signs, but they will be supported by the research that I have been conducting for the digital tour. I’m also very pleased that I will get to work with two of my favorite UCF professors, Dr. Amy Giroux and Dr. Scot French for this grant which will run through the end of next June!
Another detail I was able to work out with my supervisor was how to approach the Clio entries. This was a concern of mine, as I’ve mentioned previously. We decided that for the purposes of this semester’s internship, I will create a “proof of concept” base tour. This means that I will be using my six chosen central locations but only selecting one topic from each location to write a full Clio entry for. I will then be able to group those six entries together in a tour that can be considered a deliverable for this course as well as serving as a test model to build out the rest of the tours. It was important to my supervisor that the entries be “mix and matchable” so that creating theme tours down the line would be fairly straightforward. This does mean that each of the many topics chosen will need an individual entry.
Choosing the six topics to create my entries has actually been fairly difficult because I am just so excited to share all the stories that I’ve been uncovering! However, thanks to the grant I’ll be able to get to all of them! I decided that it would probably be best to focus on the “cemetery-centric” topics for the proof of concept tour. These are the topics I’ve chosen:
Segregation
“Pauper” burials
Cemetery origins
The original entrance
The Civil War monuments
The Sperry Fountain
I’ve been able to flesh out my research notes this week quite a bit for all six locations, mostly encouraged by my panic at realizing that my newspapers.com subscription was ending on July 6th. Thankfully, I was able to save full pages and clippings for all the topics that I’ve been researching this semester. So, hopefully (*fingers crossed*), I won’t need to worry about that again until later. At least there's always the library!
I also spent some time today at the Orange County Regional History Center’s archive to get a closer look at a few things which I think will prove to be very useful in my final product. One thing in particular is a bit thrilling because I noticed a conflict with some sources that I was able to uncover and work out. Sorry to keep you on the edge of your seat, but you'll have to wait until later to find out what I discovered!
With any luck, my next update will have more details about the grant and possibly a Clio entry or two!
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