For the upcoming semester, this blog will primarily serve as a weekly log for my internship. I’ll begin with a brief introduction of myself and my work, as well as what I hope to gain from this experience and what I have planned for the week ahead.
My name is Ross, and I am a Public History M.A. candidate at the University of Central Florida. My research interests are in cultural history, as well as the burgeoning field of digital history- and the tools and techniques we can use to develop, share, and preserve historical knowledge in the Information Age. In terms of historical subjects, I am currently studying American culture in the 1950s, and the ways in which domestic impacts of “containment policy”, Jim Crow, and rigid gender norms influenced the moral panic around juvenile delinquency. In addition to the mountain of books I have for the upcoming semester, I am currently reading John E. O’Connor’s Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television and Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby’s Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange.
I am coming into this internship with the expectation that I will be able to develop a practical understanding of applying digital history tools and methodology to a public history project (in this case, the Greenwood Cemetery program being spearheaded by Sarah Miller Boye). In addition to helping produce multimedia for the project, I will be assisting in an upcoming History Harvest- an excellent, hands-on opportunity for both community engagement and project development. In addition to providing a way to collect physical materials, History Harvests are also an opportunity to perform oral history interviews. As such, the first item on my to-do list is to complete the CITI Program for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Training. As I understand it, the program is designed to educate researchers on the moral and ethical conduct for conducting oral histories and similar interview-based collections. My goal is to complete it sometime over the following week and write about it in my next post.
Cultural History on Horseback 