Blog Post #2

What are you enjoying the most during this experience? 

For my internship with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, what I am enjoying the most with this experience has been meeting and interacting with others. I have been going into the office one day a week. Initially, there were more people in the office, but the last few weeks the office has been more quiet, as employees are either taking time off or working from home. I attended a staff meeting where interns introduced ourselves. Another exciting aspect of going into the office is having the opportunity to look at all the artifacts and posters on the walls. While the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage is not one of the Smithsonian’s public museums, they have an amazing collection of items from all over the world.  Many of these are shown in an online exhibition called “Storied Objects,” which can be found on social media platforms. 

https://festival.si.edu/storied-objects

I have also been attending as many Smithsonian Internship events as I can, including a field trip to the Library of Congress, and a visit and tour of the Museum of Natural History’s rare books collection. This also gives me an opportunity to meet other Smithsonian interns.

My project for this internship involves working with audio transcription from this past summer’s Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival, Indigenous Voices of the Americas. I have spent the past few weeks reading over written transcriptions of a variety of narrative sessions.   Some of the topics include indigenous sports, indigenous sovereignty, the arts, missing indigenous women, military veterans, tourism, ecology and sustainability, to name a few. I have been enjoying this too, as it is giving me an opportunity to learn more about current indigenous culture. Last Friday, my supervisor Rebecca Fenton and I discussed which transcription to start with and decided on one of the Indigenous sovereignty sessions. 

What could you do during the internship to help create more positive experiences like these? 

To help create more positive experiences like these, I can continue to visit the office and hopefully meet and interact with other employees. I can also take advantage of attending events organized by the Smithsonian Office of Academic Appointments and Internships. 

Have you learned anything about your work style preference as a result? 

While I do enjoy reading the transcripts and other stories from the summer festival, I also like to work collaboratively with others. I like sharing ideas and listening to others talk about their knowledge of a particular subject. I hope to have more opportunities to do so during my time interning at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. 

Because the transcripts are not made public, I am sharing similar stories from the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s website. I read over these blog posts when I first started the internship to become familiar with this summer’s festival. 

https://festival.si.edu/blog/2024-folklife-festival/indigenous-voices-americas