What about your internship has been an eye-opening exper-ience? What were your initial expectations? Have these expectations changed now that you are half-way through? How? Why?
What I wanted most out of this internship is what I wanted out of the program: exposure to tools and practice. The fall was a trial on account of Library of Congress stonewalling, and the attendant anxiety about coming out empty-handed. When the wall opened in late November, the initial work was less about new tools and more about existing content. For the first three months, until March, I listened to interviews with Native American veterans, and talked with my mentor about the ultimate objective: a Story Map mosaic of the interviewees’ experience in the service. I recall ending my first three posts with an ellipsis, more or less. I hoped to put Story Maps to use, as an actual means to make an actual product. But aside from consulting Kathy Carroll’s work, and reading the platform’s near monthly updates, the project was inchoate, and Story Maps was distant.
I’ve had several phone calls with VHP staff aside from my mentor over the past three weeks, one of whom I helped with the Project’s bimonthly “Experiencing War” site, by writing “blurbs,” transcribing interviews, selecting poignant passages, and the like. But while I can’t say that the work was eye-opening, or that it satisfied my early expectations, it was new, it did move me from the margin of the VHP staff, limited to my mentor, closer to the middle, in contact with three other members of a ten-person cohort. I was proving my usefulness, and that made me happy. Which brings me to my eye-opening experience of the past month: the long awaited plunge into Story Maps. I was greatly disappointed to find out from those staffers, after spending hours patterning my Map after Kathy Carroll’s, that the Library of Congress limits all Story Maps on its domain to the Classic version that stopped development in 2018. The red tape had struck again. The silver lining on which is a new appreciation for the dynamism of platforms and apps.
So I enter the second half of my internship excited to finish the Map in the coming weeks, and pleased by my VHP contacts’ responses to what I’ve produced thus far.. I’ve been able to track down four VHP contributors with help from membership on whitepages.com to ask for visual material, of which the VHP has too little. And the result is a Map that is far richer visually than the VHP staff had expected. Once it’s done, by mid June, I’m expecting, I’m not sure what I’ll do next. But if I had my choice, I would transition from the journalistic hunt for new materials from old veterans, and from Story Maps classic, to learning more from my mentor about what he–the VHP’s tech-head–knows and does. His machinations on social media, has navigation of the Library’s arcane IT systems, and with it, the jargon that flies over my head whenever we talk about either. And then, perhaps, he could assign me another job with another tool, and the momentum could resume in a new direction.
