HIS 5944 (4/16-4/23/2021)

 This week I began to compile a list of the people that we have interviewed to assure that we cover as many perspectives on the pandemic within the college as possible. When discussing the project’s parameters early on, I wanted to use the “ark” system with compiling two perspectives from each respective college or group. For example, we wanted to have a minimum of two History students or faculty perspectives to not overwhelm the project with only History majors. In addition, the project was concerned with only garnering responses from males, so it was important that we did not interview repetitive subjects. These parameters made that aspect a priority going forward as I believe that the interviews we have could be improved upon with further perspectives.

Prioritization has been a unique skill to learn through the internship both with the work I need to do and the interviews I conduct. Certain individuals may seem more important to contributing to the purposes of this project more than others. I believed that everyone has a voice to be heard in these times, yet we must remember that everyone experienced it differently or suffered in different ways. In addition, I will confess that marketing has become a focus for me lately yet the timeframe of the end of the Spring semester has slightly hindered the process. Most students or professors remain focused on the end of the semester with examinations which has given them less time to give interviews. Perhaps during the May and Summer semester, students and professors may be more open to giving interviews due to the break usually taken.

Conducting the list helped validate my contribution as our interviews grew from 2020 towards a wider range. When I was given the project, I only saw six interviews given from the contributions from Dr. Murphree’s Professionalization Class. Upon creating this Excel sheet, the project encompasses roughly fifty interviews. This achievement was a collective effort with the Library’s Special Collections and University Archives helping the process. I cannot take credit that these interviews rose due to my expertise and am grateful that, as a team, we were able to have an improvement in the quantity while maintaining the quality of these interviews.

As I reach the end of the semester with this internship, it has taught me much about Oral History and conducting interviews. In some part, I feel more confident in giving oral histories about events that remain fresh in the interviewees’ minds. Knowing what questions to ask or reading the room only comes from experience instead of the typical book experience. How to market yourself and the project to others who could provide a unique perspective on an event is important and a worthwhile skill to learn.

I would like to thank Mary Rubin, Dr. Scot French, and everyone involved in the COVID-19 project that has helped me understand more about the effects of the pandemic on UCF. I believe that future researchers will be interested in getting a social history of the effects within Orlando.

HIS 5944 (04/03-04/09/2021)

 

The week consisted of continued captioning and further marketing for the internship. The project has been running smoothly with my transition as the lead of it. I am glad to say that this week was more reflective of how far this project had come in comparison to back in January or even in the Fall of 2020. The month of April always seems to be a busy time due to the closure of the semester, but I am happy to say that the project has not slowed down nor suffered due to the timing. So far, the project has a plethora of interviews online or in the process of being published that will set out to expand upon the perspective of COVID-19 on UCF’s constituents.

One aspect of this project that surprises me includes the aspect of reproaching those interviewed to have a follow up after a year. Reading that within the instructions Mary gave me made me think on how collective memory shifts between the time you experience an event and what you remember. Details or subtle things may seem more pronounced when given a fast discussion of it in comparison to after a year. For example, I recall in a class a professor remarked on how a holocaust survivor wrote extensively about the concentration in Warsaw about the three chimneys always smoking before the brief attempt at breaking free. The professor stated that, by historians’ accounts, there was no chimneys nor smoke during the time. We often think about things in the moment and so reading the instructions to take these interviews again makes me wonder what will be different.

In Alfred W. Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic, the historian writes extensively on the pandemic that occurs roughly a hundred years before. Comparisons aside, the 1918 Spanish Flu collectively is whisked away according to Crosby. Crosby studies a vast amount of area such as cities, military bases, outposts internationally where Americans were stationed due to the war. These perspectives quickly did not remark on it even if the sickness killed more than the war did.

Crosby asks the question how does this happen? How do historians notice this lapse of memory within the collective public on an incident remarkable?

Crosby speculates that the impact of it was overshadowed by the perception of the war or the nature of the flu being so fast. In comparing this to the COVID-19 pandemic, do we have that same luxury?

These interviews have shown me that the pandemic has severely hampered academic or private life from students to faculty. Students experienced blockages in their academic routines, inability to see friends, and having to respect safe guidelines to stop the virus. We live in a society that has a vast amount of communication and ability to attend class from home. However, that does not mean that the virus lacks any depth to it regarding severity. The internship has taught me how collective memory works and how people remember their experiences during a pandemic. In a few months, after this internship, I’d like to know how people remembered it in comparison to their first interview. Differences could provide me more knowledge on a subject and a second chance for the interviewee to share their perspective.

Even after a year of the virus, the participants in this project certainly continue to feel the struggles of living within a post-pandemic world.

HIS 5944 (03/27-04/02/2021)

 

This week continued with the administration process with me catching up. The metadata sheets continue to be an interesting reminder of the interviews that I have given. As I participate in this project, the number of interviews that I have given has only increased that I may forget the details so these data sheets are useful in that regard. Next week should see me doing captioning which I further describe later within this post. For now, the administration process has concluded.

Regarding marketing, I have reached out and received some feedback from some of the people of interest. I was disappointed to hear that one professor from the Computer Science department declined to speak to me due to their busy schedule. While their perspective would have made it interesting, there was no way of convincing them nor any reason to push further. Perhaps a follow up question to see if they are still interesting would be acceptable. Other professors have not given me a response, but I suppose this is merely a skill to hone regarding communication and email ethics.

One of the interviews given was from a professor I greatly respect, Daniel Murphree, a professor at the UCF History Department. Contrasting with Gerber, Dr. Murphree was far more interesting on the professional side. The interview covered much of the professor’s dealings with classes and handling students in different ways. This may be due to Murphree’s smaller class sizes instead of Gerber. Murphree brought up a rather interesting suspicion that some students may take advantage of the COVID situation and may get away with certain things. The interview provided another perspective of a professor dealing with the pandemic and it’s effects on students.

In some ways, the pandemic has fostered some cynical perspectives throughout the year as students have begun to show some distrusting of those without masks. There is no way of each professor verifying if a student is overexaggerating their sickness to be more sympathetic which could be a possibility. Although, faculty and students continue to have some optimism with their continued adherence to safety guidelines placed into the university.

Due to the substantial amount of interview given, parts of the project have halted with me attempting to aid in streamlining the process. Captioning is one of these stages for the oral history as it allows for people to follow along the transcriptions and understand what the interviewee is saying. This can be helpful in case they have a particular accent or somethings may be hard to hear. I watched an instructional video given to us by the Special Collection and University Archives which use a program to caption the interviews. The process is slightly tedious as you must make sure that the captions are correct and within frame. Sometimes a student may be talking fast so the caption may not be there, and you have to be sure that it does not linger either. The process is grueling, so it has taken up a substantial amount of time for me to complete. However, this is a new skill of transcription and video editing which I have only been slightly familiar too. I am grateful to have this opportunity within the project and internship.

HIS 5944 (3/20-3/26/2021)

 

This week saw the continued routine of administrative backend work to bring up to speed the interviews conducted. I noticed that my interviews schedule was not being processed due to the number of interviews I conducted. Six interviews that were conducted lacked being placed in the process to be properly transcribed or reviewed. Rushing through the project will leave other portions behind as if I focus solely on marketing, the review process slightly slows down. This week I processed some of these interviews to be transcribed yet needed a metadata sheet for the final process. These interviews included the political affiliated UCF students or organizations which were very vital in importance.

This led me to something I dealt with which was prioritization that this interview helped teach me. How does a historian prioritize certain sources or pieces of information above others? I find it hard to dismiss others’ perspectives of the COVID-19 pandemic that repeat themselves yet someone else may find it extremely easy to do so. One of the interviews I conducted this week reiterated that same sentiment, asking if they gave me something useful. I informed the interviewee that it did not matter if they gave me a piece of new information. A historian cannot establish a commonality if there was only one perspective. It is true that some perspectives will be more valuable as Matthew Gerber’s position as a teacher would be helpful, yet not one interview should triumphantly dissuade the collection of information. Prioritization to know who to interview and to pull either a common trend or a unique aspect is extremely useful in the field of history and oral history.

In addition, I require some comments on the internship from home experience. Mondays and Fridays are the days I actively work on the internship and properly provide for the COVID-19 project. Wednesdays are days typically reserved to go in person to the UCF Library in order to aid in whatever Mary Rubin requires of me. That could be processing a collection or helping move some materials to new areas for storage.

Interning from home is difficult in the same way that classes being online with their lack of transparency and ease of distractions. Distractions are abound throughout the process as having my computer here and being at home makes me less focused. I can confess sometimes taking a small break to watch a short YouTube video has occurred. However, it can be very helpful as I feel more productive at home than being stressed in a new place. The internship has taught me this mixed modality of working from home as well as easing me back into proper life.

Subtle details often become overlooked as we continue through the seemingly end of the pandemic with the vaccine. I am sure most people will want to tell their stories about the quarantine or the pandemic’s effects on them. Most students that have spoken to me have really gave interest to wanting to study the pandemic’s long-term effects. Nobody truly knows the impact of the virus as we continue to piece together the events occurring, yet I can guarantee that each perspective will matter when historians begin looking into the topic.

HIS 5944 (3/13-3/19/2021)

 

This week saw less interviews than before as we have slightly slowed down in marketing to catch up on the administrative front end. The project exhibits an ebb and flow between processing interviews and conducting them. I interviewed two people with one of them being a professor within an unique department within the University of Central Florida. Prior to my contact, my extent into the University’s wide range of departments was limited to the History Department. Contacting professors in the History Department felt more comfortable to approach as someone that belonged in the department. However, to continue with the integrity of the COVID-19 project, I pitched the idea of collecting perspectives from the vast other departments within UCF. I coined it as the “Noah’s Ark” approach or “arking” it, simply meaning gathering two perspectives, at minimum, to preserve. I confess that this process is slower than simply randomly pulling people, yet it does provide for different perspectives on the effects of COVID.

For example, the Department of History does not rely on being present within a laboratory to conduct experimentations or work that the Department of Engineering may rely on. Our work always can be done at home with a computer, typing our research out, yet we also lean on having primary or secondary sources that the library generously provides. Shutting down the library will not see an effect on the Computer Science Department as it does with the History Department. These perspectives matter in the grand scheme with how people’s attitudes are with the pandemic even drawing aside the differences between students and teachers.

On Monday, I had the pleasure of interviewing the Computer Science Department’s Matthew Gerber who was very pleasing to listen about his reaction to the pandemic. As a teacher, Gerber experienced challenges of switching modality and providing for the education without the advantage of being used to a physical methodology of teaching. Throughout my academic endeavors, it is often difficult to separate the person from the professor as a student. The students only see the professor as a pseudo-boss as someone who gives lectures and grades papers or assignments with a lacking care. However, Gerber’s interview represents a reminder that the professor is a human being with their own troubles within their life. I was happy to hear that his own students cared for him as much as he cared for them and their education.

Gerber’s interview brought up a few questions and future endeavors that I may seem to be interested in. We discussed if there was a difference with education going from a regular society to a pandemic world and such. However, what really was pivotal with this interview was his contacts and suggestions for the project. He named a few professors and some CPEL that would also have a unique perspective of the effects of COVID-19.

I am happy to say that this internship has helped me identify with professors and empathize with them at a different level than as a graduate or undergraduate student. The pandemic has reminded us that deep down we are all human beings attempting to get through the day. I hope that this project can capture that perspective which reveals the more human part that sometimes is difficult to ascertain.

HIS 5944 (3/6-3/12/2021)

 

This week surrounded the continued efforts of marketing towards the Student Government and political centered organizations. The marketing aspect of the project has an endless potential of gathering perspectives that I continue to explore. Student Government and the political organizations on campus sometimes are overlooked due to their seemingly difficult entry to email yet I experienced the opposite of that preconceived notion. The Student Government officers, and officers of these UCF sanctioned clubs were rapid in their response and enthusiasm to contribute to the project. I am thankful that the students and officials in these institutions participated in the project, allowing for a perspective of COVID-19 beyond the average student.

Outside of those aspects of marketing, the professor I was slated to be interviewing needed to reschedule which was slightly disappointing. However, I understand that we are in the mid-spring semester where examinations are still occurring and preparation for spring break is coming up. In the future, I would like more than just this professor and one from the History Department. A marketing team would be a perfect fit for this project if we had an unlimited amount of manpower to garner more attention. Mary informed me on Monday that we would be holding off on the social media post due to the massive influx of interviews this week. Hopefully, we continue to see that trend exhibited by UCF students and faculty.

Last week saw me email the College Democrats and College Republicans for an interview as they were the main popular political RSO (official) UCF clubs on campus. The involvement of these two clubs allows for a researcher or viewer to understand the political side of COVID-19 and the University of Central Florida. Were students active or passive during the quarantine or where they actively campaigning? Questions like that were the initial ones to come to mind along with the 2020 presidential election amidst a pandemic.

However, I was very worried about skewing the project and muddying the intent. Historians often deal with the problem of attempting to be indifferent or seemingly apolitical. However, I have learned most historians mask their political perspectives as best as they can. Obviously, Marxist historians present their political affiliation easier than other historians. For me, I tried to remain impartial to both sides and make sure that the College Dems and College Republicans were given the same questions and emailing both. Only the College Democrats have schedule and given interviews for me to use while the College Republicans have not given me anything. Much like last week, should historians remain politically active within their sphere? It is a difficult debate that seems to be up to the historian themself. Either way, I cannot deny that the political aspect of the pandemic remains absolutely vital in policies enacted by the universities. It is almost inescapable to converse or discuss policies without identifying the political lens. 

The College Democrats' interview helped me reaffirm my confidence in facilitating the discussion of politics with their Vice President and President. They were very professional in making sure that it did not dive too much into the political area and I, sometimes, interjected to keep them within the parameters of the project. However, I discovered a vast amount of information from these interviews. Aspects of students campaigning, making sure that people were following UCF guidelines, and a plethora of information that solidified the potential of these interviews.

This week taught me about the care of handling a controversial topic such as politics within archival and historical work. Politics can be a divisive topic to anyone that may alienate your audience or peers. However, this archival internship has helped me gain more experience in dealing with these subjects and utilize this to further enhance the potential of the project. These perspectives will be very beneficial for those looking back on UCF students’ response to the pandemic within the pandemic.

HIS 5944 (2/27-3/5/2021)

The publication of the interviews given is now available for public viewing which has properly motivated me to continue this project. I am very proud with how they were and, after viewing a few, I decided to incorporate feedback from it into future interviews. I will be posting a link to the STARS link on UCF for any interested to view. To continue the privacy of this blog, Mary Rubin’s interview of me will be the one I link for those interested.

Scott Galloway STARS Interview: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/covid19-memory/3/ 

Marketing Mondays have been working well yet Mary and I realized that the slow stream of interviews may be concerning. Mary noted that she would be working on having a social media post for the project to continue gathering interview participants. I thought that was best for now while I persisted with the professors I emailed. One of them had immediately expressed interest within the Computer Science Department which I am very honored to interview. This will allow the project to further broaden the parameters of our interviewees. A method I came up with last semester was the “ark” method inspired by Noah’s Ark. Two interviewees from a department that will allow the project to properly give representation to UCF’s population. A future endeavor would be considering the majors and departments that the project covers for a proper analysis on representation.

 This week regarding marketing saw me reaching out for participants in RSO’s and Student Government within the university. I successfully reached out to the Student Government President during their tenure between 2020 to 2021 as well as the speaker of the Student Government’s legislative branch. There was one concern that I had thought about which was the RSO’s I have reached out to are rather political in nature. This raises an issue with how they may perceive the interview and if they may alter the course of it. I shared the concern with Mary and was given some advice for interviewing them.

With the “ark” method, we will only be interviewing two of them from the organizations as well as steer the conversation towards the talk about COVID-19 rather than about a political message. It can be quite difficult as COVID-19 seems to already spark talks about politics and policies regarding how the United States and UCF handled the pandemic. However, I am confident that these interviews will show the activism of students attempting to inspire changes within a global pandemic. There seems to always be the risk of the interviewee expressing desire to discuss something that is not in line with the true purpose of the project.

However, this experience will help me become a better interviewer and teach me communication skills to properly realign the conversation. This internship has certainly improved my email and communication skills to properly convey the purpose of the project and advertise for it. While historians or history students usually write for their audiences of like-minded individuals, the true skill of a historian is appealing to the reader and hooking them to either understand or seek further knowledge of a subject. In a way, this is similar with making sure the interviewee continues to understand the purposes of this project.

HIS 5944 (2/20-2/26/2021)

 

This week continued to see the collection progress to the approval stage of a plethora of interviews. Unfortunately, they have not all been approved nor public access quite yet. As of the publication of this blog, a few other interviews were slated to be approved and published to STARS. The process of publication requires approval from Mary Rubin so it is out of my control. However, we hope that it is published next week and will have a large bulk of the interviews that we have slated. As a reminder, these interviews include students that experienced the pandemic through different ways which I implore you to look at. Patience seems to always be a good characteristic to have as one cannot rush through oral histories as it requires a great deal of attention.

Mary and I came up with Marketing Mondays where we discuss marketing for the project. Up until now, Mary has refrained from posting the existence of the project to social media for several reasons. Posting on social media may give us a large influx of people that want to be interviewed that will overwhelm the project. In addition, we must question the morality of these people wanting to participate, only wishing to muddy the true purpose of the project. I have sent emails to professors who still have not come back to me with a confirmation of interest. This includes professors from outside the History Department which does disappoint me. This upcoming Monday will see Mary and I contemplate if we need to post this on social media to draw in more people as interviews have slightly slowed down.

I have also been working on perusing through a few reviews of interviews that were done last semester from my previous internship. A student from Dr. Murphree’s Professionalization the History Major interviewed students from Student Government within the University which gave me an insightful look at an often-overlooked perspective from a student. The student was very skilled at discussing and properly giving questions to the interviewee. Upon my reviews, I have tried to incorporate some characteristics exhibited by the student into my own interviews which I have planned.

This week also was my mid-term evaluation that I had emailed Mary Rubin about. Reviewing it again, I was happy to see that Mary was eager to have me on the team as a part time intern. She commented on my hard work and addition to the team which gave me more motivation and self-worth. There was only comment that gave me something to think about which was my dress code. Working as a part time student in a pandemic has certainly made me dress a little less formal than usual. It has illuminated that most oral histories seem to have a professional aspect and yet the COVID-19 project contrasts this with students or faculty being at home. They are in their regular clothing that they would wear at home which is slightly more relatable than being in a standard interview room with a crew there. While I do need to think about my choice of clothing, it also has led me to believe that the appearance of these interviews may seem more relatable to the viewer.

HIS 5944 (2/13-2/19/2021)

 

This week, the internship had me continuing my process of going through administrative processes. With the publication of this blog, all the administrative process should be finished for now. The most exciting portion of this week stemmed from being able to publish these interviews for the public to view. I am happy to see that these interviews can now be accessed and presented out. Next week should see them available as submission takes some time due to the approval process. Even my own interview will be there for public research if it ever may be accessed. There is some worry that some of these interesting or insightful interviews may never be utilized for public research. It is so hard to determine if in the future a student will recognize these interviews and understand the weight behind them. Certainly, that situation has made me look at archived oral histories far more differently such as the September 11 digital archive.

The weight of these interviews becomes more easier once time has set in. These interviews carry tragedy and hope of a better future without being stifled by the fear of a pandemic. I encourage those that read this blog to investigate these interviews and watch one to see how people coped through the pandemic. There were so many ways people coped such as playing games, picking up hobbies, watching shows, and other recreational activities.

The marketing of the interviews has been slightly better than previous weeks with continued discussion of emailing people previously interested. Mary had given me a list of people who had already been interested yet refused to be interviewed. It is disappointing yet understandable with how some people become spontaneously busy between semesters. However, others have asked to be interviewed once more which I am ecstatic about. I am still in the talks with emailing the professors from different colleges within the university, yet I have not received an answer yet.

During one of our private meetings, Mary provided me with some feedback with how I am conducting these interviews which has made me consider implementing them in future ones. One critique was my use of “I assume” which conveys more of me guiding the interviewer which is not a good thing. I realized while reading the transcripts how much I say it which made me laugh, yet also pushing me to tone that down. In addition, another piece of feedback or discussion was how interviewers fall within two categories: introverted and extroverted. The introverts are the ones who speak less and answer the question very fast when interviewed with as little detail as possible. These people are difficult from the interviewer perspective because you must hone your skill of trying to bring out their unique perspectives. I will say that the introverts seem to be the diamond in the rough more often than the extroverts. The extroverts are the ones who talk for hours on end and provide so many details which can be helpful. However, the interviewer needs to know when to stop them from talking their ear off. These skills make oral history more complex than what I previously subscribed it to be which I am glad to learn.

HIS 5944 (2/6-2/12/2021)

 

The COVID-19 project continues to be a fascinating project that allows me to practice oral history within a real-life event. This week acted as catching up regarding administrative work as I was still organizing, and filling paperwork related to the interviews I have conducted for the past semester or so. Some interviews’ paperwork still was not filled out or completed that dated to last year in the Fall Semester. The paperwork usually consists of the interviewees name, private information, and some description of the interview to be filed into the process for when it is published. These documents allow for the Special Collection and University Archives workers to use these metadata sheets to enhance either their transcription or review process to assure proper quality control. However, I will admit that the paperwork end of oral history becomes more tedious than the actual interviews.

Progress on marketing or interviews have stymied due to the administration process yet we have a good sample size of participants willing to be interviewed. This includes my previous discussions on professors such as Dr. Murphree or Dr. Hardy to share their perspective on the pandemic. While Dr. Hardy politely declined, Dr. Murphree expressed interest and it helps that he knows me personally from my classes. I hope that this does not affect the interview itself. As for professors such as those within the departments outside of the History department, I have been patiently debating on whether to send an email. Because of this administrative process, it was my thought that adding more interviews would only exacerbate the process.

This week taught me more about filling paperwork and understanding the importance of responsibility. It is my responsibility to fill this paperwork so that the other workers can properly perform their tasks. A failure within the process results in a lower quality and reflects poorly on both the project and those working under it.

The internship has mainly been focused on working from home this week which brings its own challenges. I will be frank that being at home can be a large distraction and it is easy to slack off because of the inability of someone looking over. However, I have found myself being more productive at home than at work due to my comfortability of home. The COVID-19 pandemic has tested some workers and students from dealing and being properly motivated to work through a pandemic.

I have learned the value of motivation and self-worth through this internship that I never properly valued as much as an undergraduate. Being motivated to solve or complete a task lets you focus on the important things instead of being distracted by outside factors. It is a quality that many of us do not dwell on due to our own motivations to stay focused. I recall that interview with the freshman student who shared their story that motivation was critical in the pandemic because it is easy to fall into the rabbit hole of boredom and sloth. I hope that when I find myself in said hole that I can dig myself out of it easily.

HIS 5944 (1/30-2/5/2021)

 

This week continued to run administrative tasks with some interviews sprinkled into the week. I have been attempting to catch up with providing the collection with consent forms from myself and the interviewees which takes some time. In addition, I must fill out sheets that include data about the interview which can be difficult as interviews begin to pile up. However, the internship has taught me endurance when faced with a large task and to work at it slowly. The light will eventually be at the end of the tunnel. While tedious, the quality of the interviews has continued to be high quality for university students. Most students seem comfortable with discussing the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on their lives.

When I conduct an interview, typically, I remind them that it is public, and I may ask questions they have already heard before during the interview. Lately, due to my commitment to empathy, I have begun incorporating other warnings or reminders. I often ask the student or faculty member that if they ever feel uncomfortable with a question, they can move on which I think is acceptable. Empathy is always a good thing to have in oral history and with such a topic that is fresh in their minds that sparks tragedy. I was blessed to not have any significant tragedies during the pandemic, but from hearing so many dark moments, the interviewees may have already coped with it. Oral history can be a dangerous practice when you skew people into having to relive a certain dark time. I cannot fathom how Holocaust survivors conduct oral histories and not crack under the stress of having to relive and remind themselves of the horrors they have seen.

I’d like to talk about aspects that seem to be less accentuated during these interviews as notes on what the collection does not seem to have. One aspect is the dorm life that seems missing as students seemed content with the university’s response regarding management of dormitories. Another is the faculty which I have not conducted an interview yet as setting appointments can be difficult. These aspects seem less accentuated from the interviews I have seen. However, it is nice to know that students were not too worried about housing in the long list of troublesome events within the pandemic.

 Some of my tasks at the internship included helping move archival documents or furniture into a new storage room. A physical task was unexpected for me yet it seemed important to be able to move objects from one place to another in archiving. I did not expect it to be so difficult for me. It certainly has taught me that archival relocation takes longer than what I had thought. I am thankful that there was a dolly to move the cabinets to a new room as my arms would have collapsed. While humorous, the physical task of moving has also taught me the tendency of moving collections to different places. The new room that we were assigned to move the equipment to was only given within the last year which the Special Collections and University Archives seemingly did not have. It makes me wonder if digitization will have that same troubles of requiring physical space for collections.

HIS 5944 (1/23-1/29/2021)

 

This week shifted the priority of the COVID-19 project towards an administrative focus instead of conducting various amounts of interviews. The process of transitioning has begun to conclude with Mary providing as many interviews as possible that were conducted last semester in the fall. In addition, I have begun to upload my own interviews that I had in my own files that were temporarily lost due to a computer malfunction last semester. The administrative portion of the process consists of documenting and uploading the files while marking them correctly. This includes providing consent forms, cataloguing interviews, and properly placing them in the process. The internship taught me much about archiving and the importance of small details such as dates, names, and other aspects of an interview. It allowed me to understand the immense amount of work outside of the actual interview that has made me appreciate the behind-the-scenes portion of oral history.

While covering the administrative responsibilities of the COVID-19 project, I still conducted interviews this week with students that have shared insightful perspectives about their response to COVID-19. Due to the lecture given at Dr. Murphree’s Native American history class, I was able to get a few students that wanted to share their perspective on COVID-19. One particular student even catching COVID-19 during their studies which has helped me understand the virus from someone directly affected by it. Empathy has been a critical trait to hold during these oral histories. I often read accounts of people going through the virus, yet it always shocks me when I hear the stories told by those that have caught it. Another aspect that has been captured in this collection is the freshman experience from the Fall of 2020 to the Spring of 2021. Freshman students coming to the University of Central Florida often experience a lack of motivation from the transition of high school to college level courses. One interview discussed this trouble and the lack of a good first year experience. This pandemic has robbed freshman of truly experiencing what the college life has to offer by restricting them to the prisons of their dorms or homes.

These perspectives only highlight the importance of the COVID-19 project and capturing these insights that the university students have. Sometimes, I feel the need to switch my thesis to the study of the pandemic’s effects, yet I am still dedicated to the study of digital history. However, I hope that in the future a historian will use this collection to define how Central Florida university students handled the pandemic and inspired hope for those that may live through another pandemic to “charge on.”

My academic endeavors in graduate and undergraduate school have helped me hone my skills to properly address this project. The project has again taught me time management and attention to detail that the history major prepared me for. The internship has also promoted empathy towards those affected by the pandemic. My experience with oral history has been very good and I am confident that in the future, I will be able to transfer these skills I am learning now into future employment.

HIS 5944 (1/18-1/22/2021)

 

This week saw a continued transference from Mary’s documents to my own purview. I have felt as though I am responsible for the project and have continued to do my best to be professional as possible. Leading projects was not something that the history major fundamentally provided for as it was attuned to research and papers. Projects like the COVID-19 collection aid me in handling the sheer weight of this. There are many interviews still being reviewed and transcribed for processing to publish to the public. As I review the transcriptions to correct errors, it reminds me of how synthesizing and reading comprehension continue to be a vital role in the real world that the history major did provide for me. The internship has helped me see how the process occurs and how just a minor thing such as transcribing can take a very long time to process. Time management continues to be a vital part of our role in both writing and researching historical knowledge.

So far, progress on the COVID-19 collection has been moving smoothly with the transition between Mary Rubin’s interviews and my own. I’ve already begun to reach out to students and other faculty that I wish to interview. A few of the faculty have come forth to be interviewed from the History Department at UCF which I am eager to hear their perspective. It is a very often occurrence where students lack the other side of the classroom: the professors. I suspect that the professors from the History Department are going to completely differ from the professors from the Computer Science Department at the university. Our major does not require the use of computers and most professors seem to lean towards the physical approach to their classes. From my own digital history research last semester, historians, arguably justified in this approach, underestimate the abilities that technology can provide us.

Another divergence is professors that taught the general education within the History Department versus the professors that were more specific. For example, a professor that was teaching American History tailored for the general education students who are not majoring in History may had to work extra hard. Classes that are specific for the History Major typically have students who are already passionate enough to learn the class no matter the modality.

The internship has led me to investigate the perceptions of the victims of COVID-19 both from the students and faculty point of view. Some people recall different things such as the BLM movement in the summer, dorm situations in the spring of 2020, and other details that are not shared by two individuals. This only makes my resolve to document and historicize these perspectives grow as I cannot imagine that the posterity of historians may have access to this information. Oral history is a vital part of research and I am happy that I can participate in this opportunity. I hope that the COVID-19 project will expand to capturing more diverse interviewees as only focusing on one singular department may lead towards a skewed perspective.

HIS5944 (1/11/21 - 1/15/21)

Hello, my name is Scott Galloway and I am a graduate student at the University of Central Florida. I was given the wonderful opportunity to be an intern at the University of Central Florida’s Library in Special Collections and University Archivists. I received this internship due to my volunteering that I had previously done at the SCUA while I was in undergraduate. From that volunteering service, I was able to understand the importance of archiving and processing a collection. I had processed around four collections that ranged from a box or two to around four or five boxes to process. I’d like to think that I had performed well enough that Mary Rubin and the SCUA wanted me back.

My research interests are still grounded in digital history which aligns with this internship with the COVID-19 Collection. I began on Monday this week to discover the digitization process along with Mary guiding through the steps that it takes to process an interview for public consumption. I would oversee the interviews and reviewing the transcription and captioning process. However, I was still trained to perform these actions if needed. Already, I have performed two interviews with UCF affiliated graduate students to test the process and do it independently from Mary as she is pushing the project for me to lead.

What I hope to gain from this internship is skills tailored towards digital history and preservation. I want to understand how the process works and the potential it has on the field. In addition, the COVID-19 Collection deals with a recent pandemic that the United States has continuously been affected by since early 2020 in the spring semester. Most of society has felt it’s impact in some shape or form and this collection sheds light on how, at the local level, the university’s constituents coped with the sudden change. I have been given a wonderful opportunity to make the most out of a dark time by preserving the memory of COVID-19 and understand how students dealt with a massive pandemic within the twenty-first century.

So far, my plans are to expand the project to incorporate more departments besides the history department at UCF. I began the project with some contributions from the History Department but I want to include more than just one single department. Interviews will begin to incorporate faculty such as professors to understand a perspective that is missing from the collection. It is vital to understand how both the student and the professor copes with dealing with a pandemic. No two students or professors share the same mind and have their own unique ways of handling the solitude of quarantine. My hope is that future research can be done by using the University’s COVID-19 collection to explore the effects of a pandemic within Orlando or anything of that nature. It is still a wonderful opportunity to historicize this event and has always been an interest of mine. This interest has always been to “make” and “record” history in the best way possible.