This past year, I had the opportunity to intern at the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. I was fortunate to live close enough to travel into the office and meet some of the people who put the Folklife Festival together. I was able to take advantage of field trips and webinars organized by the Smithsonian Office of Interns and Fellows. Attending these programs enabled me to meet other interns from all over the world, while also learning more about the behind the scenes operations of the Smithsonian Institution. Because of my internship, I am now more familiar with how the Smithsonian Institution functions and operates internally. 

Initially, I spent time familiarizing myself with last summer’s Indigenous Voices of the Americas Folklife Festival. I read over unedited transcripts from all the individual sessions. It was then explained to me that the digital humanities project I would be working on would be to edit timestamped transcriptions from last summer’s Festival sessions, find corresponding pictures for each transcription, and put them  together as primary source digital packages. 

What I eventually discovered is that editing the transcripts is a slow, repetitive process that took more time than I anticipated. While I did learn and practice the official guidelines for editing transcriptions, including how to set up and indicate time segments correctly, I also found that I could only edit for short periods of time because of the nature of the task. 

Because of my internship, I am now more aware that my expectations of the type of work I would be doing did not match the bulk of the work I did. I found that the information and skills we learned during our coursework may have been more theoretical in nature than the skills needed to complete the digital project I worked on. I had thought that an internship would provide an opportunity to practice a variety of digital skills, but unfortunately I spend the overwhelming majority of time editing transcriptions into time segments of thirty seconds to one minute increments. I also misunderstood the scope of the finished product. Since October, I was under the impression that I would be putting the transcript, pictures and summary together as a primary source package on the website. I did not find out until recently that all my work would be going into a folder.  I am wondering if there is a misunderstanding between the certification program, and the needs of the Smithsonian Institution for its interns. 

As my internship comes to a close, I do want to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Rebecca Fenton, for introducing me to colleagues at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and for providing guidance and assistance with the tasks I was assigned. Most importantly, I do fervently hope that the project will eventually be available for the general public because the topics, issues and information that I transcribed are a crucial part of Native American history and culture.