This felt like both the longest and shortest year ever. I learned a lot, but that means that there were times I struggled a lot. Here are my biggest takeaways from this past year:
- I learned a lot about front-end basics: aesthetic principles, how HTML/CSS/JavaScript work, Omeka, and GitHub workflow
- In the individual portion of the internship, there were a few separate moving parts through the year. Fall term was mostly about learning how these things work and going through tutorials. Winter was about starting to put things from the tutorials into practice, and spring was mostly about applying everything to specific Carleton DH projects.
- Because there was a lot of information to take in and get the hang of at once, I found that I didn’t make as many direct contributions to the Carleton DH Omeka site as I wanted to. Things like getting the GitHub workflow down and picking up development where someone else left off added extra challenges to the work.
- This is something that future interns should take into consideration: there’s an added aspect of being able to know where to make the change after the how is identified.
- I still made a couple contributions to the Carleton Omeka site in the end!
- Things are easier in person!
- The brunt of this internship was remote, but going to drop-in hours and working with the other interns in person made everything more real and fulfilling. It’s wild how much faster and more easily things get done when in person.
- Future interns should consider setting up a standing in-person meeting time like our cohort did! We would meet in Sayles, in the Libe, or other random places but also consider finding a spot that feels like home and bringing snacks and making the work fun.
- I found the group article discussions to be really enriching. They helped me think more broadly and differently about DH as a whole, and I took away things from those discussions that I could apply to the work that I was doing. I wonder how much more interesting they can get if done in person!
- The group project is crucial to this internship
- Martin, Evan. and I spent a lot of time trying to unearth the next steps of Carleton’s Guide to Medieval Rome over the year. We grounded our audit in the Socio Technical Sustainability Roadmap presented at the 2021 ILIADS Conference.
- At first, the three of us found it frustrating that we were going into this blindly, but we quickly found out that this was to our advantage: it helped us create questions that reoriented the project. We did some documentation so hopefully the next cohort of interns that picks this up will be able to work quicker as they’re not starting from scratch!
- It was so fun working with Martin and Evan to brainstorm and organize for this project. I know that Evan is staying on next year; that’ll be really helpful to continue CGMR. Best of luck to him and the new interns! They’re going to learn and accomplish so much!
