Because of My Internship, I Am…

When I sat down to think about how I would finish that sentence, I realized just how many ways I could complete it. Because of my internship with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, I am more confident in my abilities as a digital public historian. I am more comfortable working across platforms I have never worked with before. I am more aware of how cultural institutions translate complex histories for public audiences. But the answer that feels most true, the one I keep coming back to, is this: because of my internship, I am a more collaborative scholar than I was when I started.

Over the past several weeks, I have been building a virtual walking tour of the 1976 Festival of American Folklife using the Smithsonian Learning Lab. The exhibit is structured around three of the Festival’s major programs, the African Diaspora, Old Ways in the New World, and Regional America, and asks visitors to consider how cultural traditions travel, adapt, and endure. I have worked with primary sources from the Smithsonian’s Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), drafted a full script for the African Diaspora section, centered on Bernice Johnson Reagon, and navigated layout decisions for translating archival material into an exhibit experience for a public audience.

What I did not expect, when I began this work, was how much the process itself would change me. I came into this internship as someone who likes to figure things out on my own before sharing them with anyone else. I wanted my drafts to feel finished. I wanted my ideas to feel polished. But my coordinator, Sojin, has been so patient and so generous in showing me that good public humanities work does not happen that way. It happens in conversation. It happens through feedback. It happens when you are willing to share something messy and trust that the people around you want to help you make it better.

I am also leaving this experience with new questions that I am genuinely excited to keep thinking about. How do we balance the depth of academic research with the accessibility that public audiences need? How do we honor the voices and traditions represented in archival collections without flattening them into a tidy narrative? How do digital tools change the kind of stories we are able to tell, and the kind of stories we leave out?

I am so very thankful to be interning with the Smithsonian. I have grown as a digital scholar, historian, and collaborator. I came in hoping to learn more about how a major cultural institution does its work. I am leaving with a clearer sense of how I want to do mine.