by Over the duration of the school year, my time with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Because of my internship, I am more enlightened on what it takes to maximize myself when working within the humanities. Each professor I had at George Mason University has aided my skills and knowledge when research historical topics, as well as enhancing my abilities when writing history-related essays and papers. All of these skills have also helped throughout my time interning with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. With that in mind, there are two major contributors to how my skills and experience helped me as both a traditional and digital historian.
As a traditional historian, a lot of what I learned came from how to conducting primary research and structuring stories. Conducting interviews served as more than the best part of the experience, but establishing a human interaction for recording stories about different individuals and their role in the culture and national identity of American professional futsal clubs. Being able to prepare, conduct, and scrutinize these interviews helped me understand how historians prepare gathered research materials for writing about their topics. For constructing stories, Lena Crown’s time with our intern groups how to structure and write stories from the research materials we acquire. Writing a research paper or article hasn’t been my greatest strength, but her presentations expanded my understanding on capitalizing on new writing techniques while strengthening my prior weaknesses.
As a digital historian, the skills I acquired helped me create digital databases for research materials and media files and how I utilize them for structuring and researching my articles. Structuring these materials for digital databases through open-source programs like Zotero have changed the way I organize everything as a digital historian. From this organization, I was able to have an easier time accessing how I wanted each of these edited and unedited video files to flow throughout my narrative. I was also able to name and organize the acquired pictures from my interviewees that made finding them much easier on an open-source software. All these factors has helped me understand how other authors and researchers navigated and applied their research in ways that aided in getting their arguments across through narratives.
Upon reflection, my experience has been nothing but a fun and challenging one. To actually play a role in the Smithsonian Institute has been nothing short of a dream come true. I want to first thank Professor Jennifer Rosenfeld for providing me the opportunity to have this internship to begin with. Secondly, I’d like to thank Charlie Weber and Lena Crown for helping me throughout the internship in the creation and structure of my articles. Without their help, I felt that I wouldn’t have been able to maximize what I am as a historian.
