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.