One of the most valuable lessons I have been learning during my time with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage has not been about archival research or digital tools. It has been about letting go of the idea that my work needs to be perfect before anyone else sees it.

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 explores the Festival through three interpretive lenses: the African Diaspora, Old Ways in the New World, and Regional America. Through these lenses, I want visitors to consider how cultural traditions travel, adapt, and endure, and how the Festival created space for cultural expression at such a pivotal national moment. This is a project I care about very deeply, which is exactly why it was so difficult to share while it was still taking shape.

I am a perfectionist by nature. I like to have things figured out before I put them in front of someone else. In academic work, that instinct has mostly served me well. I take the time to think carefully, to revise, to make sure my arguments hold up. But I am learning that digital public humanities does not work that way. Building an exhibit is inherently collaborative. There are so many decisions about content, structure, tone, and audience that benefit from other people’s eyes early in the process, not just at the end. Waiting until everything feels “ready” means missing out on feedback that could shape the project in directions I would not have found on my own.

This is something my supervisor, Sojin, has been encouraging me to embrace, and I am starting to truly understand why. In public humanities work, sharing drafts is not a sign of weakness. It is part of the methodology. Curators share scripts and creative briefs long before anything is in final form, and their feedback during those early stages strengthens the final product. That is a very different rhythm than what I am used to in academic writing, where you often work in isolation until you have a polished draft ready to present.

The research itself has also pushed my thinking in new and exciting directions. Digging into the archives and working with primary source materials from the 1976 Festival has raised questions I did not anticipate. I find myself thinking about how a national event like the Bicentennial becomes a stage for competing ideas about American identity, and what it means to present living cultural traditions in a museum-adjacent space. These are questions I want the exhibit to sit with rather than resolve.

I am still learning how to work in this mode, which is more open, more iterative, and more comfortable with showing things before they feel finished. It is uncomfortable, but I truly believe the project will be better for it. And honestly, I think I will be too. I am so very thankful to be working with the Smithsonian and to continue learning and growing in my digital scholarship and as a historian.

It seems just yesterday that we began the semester and began discussing our various internships. I know I was a bit fearful about what to expect going into the experience, especially since I am working with such an important institution as the Smithsonian. However, since we are almost halfway through our internship, it is a good time to reflect on what has been successful thus far and what can be reevaluated and improved.

One of the most successful aspects of my work thus far is that I have made it a point to ask questions during my meetings with my internship supervisor and to find ways to expand on the work I was already doing. One example is that, in evaluating and examining the materials from the 1976 Folklife Festival, I selected articles from the program book and entered them into Voyant to create a word cloud. I then presented this to my supervisor, and she was very impressed by what digital tools we could include in our final project. I have also been relatively successful at adjusting to various barriers, the largest being the most extended government shutdown in our nation’s history.  Thankfully, my internship was not largely affected, but many of those who worked at the center where I am interning were out of work, and some of the resources I needed were unavailable.

Most importantly, I had to adapt and learn to use the digital archive management system on my own because all the training sessions were cancelled. This forced me to adapt quickly, as I was tasked with finding sources in a database with over 54 million items. Now that the government is open again, I am free to ask questions to experts in this field who have given me great relief.

As for challenges and areas I can continue to improve throughout the rest of the internship, the greatest has been balancing all my responsibilities. Outside of the internship, I am working on my dissertation prospectus and two podcasts while also co-leading a class with my advisor. These responsibilities have piled up a bit, adding further stress to my life. That being said, after the first of the year, I hope to have a bit more time to focus on a few things and avoid taking on too many projects. I plan to implement a much more structured schedule for the rest of the internship to reduce my overwhelm. However, even with these extra responsibilities, I have remained very structured and diligent in my internship work and find it a welcome escape from my other tasks.  Another challenge I can address is improving my ability to identify viable sources in the archive. The sheer amount of information and number of sources has been a bit of a learning curve, but as I continue to work with DAMS, I feel that my process will improve.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my internship thus far and am excited to continue learning and growing.

Not only has my internship with the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage taught me much more about the inner workings of the Smithsonian, but my examination and research of the 1976 Folklife Festival have also taught me much about our nation in general. With the government shutdown affecting the Smithsonian itself, one of the skills I have expanded in my repertoire is adaptability.  As a scholar, one must be willing and able to adapt when faced with a roadblock in one’s research, but the government shutdown has pushed me to a new level of adaptability. I have been very fortunate that my internship supervisor, Sojin, has not been affected by the shutdown, as she is a trusted employee.  However, I have been able to see firsthand how the shutdown affects the federal employees through the emails I have received and the resources that have been locked to me.

This has led to another skill I have expanded and further developed: how to better examine and sort for pertinent information in a massive archive. As a historian, I obviously know how to sort through archives and large amounts of data, but since gaining access to the Smithsonian Digital Archive Management System, I have learned just how challenging this can be. Not only is DAMS a very comprehensive archive, but the sheer number, upward of 50 million entries, is astounding. Not only that, but developing and learning the skills to navigate DAMS is another skill I have learned. Finding audio files, images, and other important documents related to the 1976 festival has been very interesting. In working with DAMS, a future skill I see myself developing is understanding its inner workings. I was supposed to have a DAMS training by now, but because of the shutdown, no training has been held.I look forward to gaining a better understanding and improved navigational skills from this training.

Another skill that I have developed and adapted is working with new information and software platforms. One of the Smithsonian’s most extensive educational programs is Learning Labs. Learning Labs is software designed to help showcase Smithsonian artifacts and highlight key information. My coordinator has been tasked with creating a Learning Labs collection about various aspects of the 1976 Festival. With this, I need to develop an in-depth understanding of how the platform works and the best way to share the information I have been tasked with. Learning Labs has some issues, something my coordinator admitted, but I am ready and willing to work around these challenges to provide the best results.  I am so very thankful to be interning with the Smithsonian and learning and growing in my digital scholarship and as a historian.

My work as a virtual intern for the Smithsonian Center for Cultural Heritage and Folklife has been rather interesting. I have finally obtained my credentials to work in the Smithsonian system, granting me access to their extensive collection of materials to explore and utilize. I have been assigned to work on a bibliography and annotations about the 1976 Folklife celebrations, and have been working on that primarily. Having just completed my comprehensive examinations for my PhD, I am looking forward to dedicating more time to my internship. Some of the things I have most enjoyed so far are connecting with so many new people. My intership advisor and the other person I am working with have welcomed me with open arms, and it has been very comforting. I have also thoroughly enjoyed gaining a deeper understanding of the history of the Folklife Festival and what the future festival will look like. But most of all, I just really enjoyed learning about new software, such as the Smithsonian Learning Labs. Although I have not done extensive work on the platform, it is exciting to learn new software and become familiar with new learning platforms. I am also excited to start working with other software, that is, until the government shutdown is over, so that I can set up my official account.

To create more positive experiences like the ones I have mentioned, I can continue to maintain detailed contact with my internship advisor to address any questions or concerns I may have. I also need to remain open to new experiences as I continue to step out of my comfort zone. The only way to continue having a great experience is to do what works and fix what does not. I also plan to continue to reach out to gain a better understanding of what my coworkers have to offer and how I can directly assist and learn from them. Finally, I will also seek feedback from my internship coordinator and others I work with to improve my performance and address current issues.

Ultimately, I have gained a deeper understanding of my work style preferences throughout this process. One thing that has remained a constant and not a great surprise throughout this internship is how much I value organization. The Smithsonian is a highly organized and thorough facility, and I am incredibly grateful for the sense of order I experienced while working there. I have also learned how to be even more organized with my internship being remote, which means I have to pay closer attention to organizational structures and exercise increased self-discipline to complete all of my projects. Overall, I am pleased and thankful, and I’m excited to continue working on my projects and the internship as a whole.

The past few weeks have seen me becoming fully integrated and gaining a better understanding of what my internship assignment, The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, exactly entails. The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH) is not a museum, a misconception that often arises. However, this does not mean that their mission is any less critical. This mission is to be a research and educational hub that focuses on culture, heritage, and community as a dynamic and living force. Much of their work comes from their popular Folklife Festival that is celebrated every year, as well as their independent recording label and the Ralph Rinzler Archives. The center strives to highlight accessibility with its work and maintain a policy of shared stewardship within the archives and materials.

My role within the larger mission is to both research and create digital work. I have been assigned three main projects thus far, and they are: to make an annotated Chicago-style bibliography of scholarly sources that pertain to the history of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I am also focusing specifically on the 1976 Folklife Festival, and I am to research academic and popular sources that discuss the 1976 Folklife Festival. With these sources, I will increase my knowledge of the festival itself, but also further the mission of the center to share cultural sustainability and shared stewardship when I use the materials to create a digital exhibit about the 1976 Folklife Festival.

With the information about the 1976 Festival, I will also assist in contextualizing this research into the upcoming 2026 Folklife Festival, as it will be tailored toward America’s semiquincentennial anniversary. I will help with the idea process and execution, creating digital media related to the 2026 theme, which focuses on various festivals.

Finally, the last aspect of my internship is learning and creating projects with a new digital platform for a mapping assignment. I will be learning and working in ArcGIS to create story maps to offer a bridge to the public about our research and historical storytelling. I look forward to growing my digital humanities skills and becoming more integrated into ArcGIS and the Smithsonian Learning Labs.

My learning goals for the internship focus on three distinct areas. First, I hope to deepen my understanding of how cultural organizations frame and sustain heritage in collaborative and community-centered ways. Second, I aim to enhance my skills, expand my knowledge, and explore new digital platforms that will enable me to understand better the software utilized at the Smithsonian and effectively share my insights in an accessible manner. With this, I can learn how to format metadata better, create story maps, or even become familiar with the Smithsonian’s in-house software. Finally, I aim to enhance my skills in curating and presenting archival and scholarly sources, not only for academics but, more importantly, for the general public. I am very much looking forward to my work at CFCH, and I look forward to gaining a better understanding of sharing and preserving culture.

In the digital age, history educators face the dual challenge of democratizing access to the past while confronting the limitations and biases embedded in digital tools and platforms. While new technologies have expanded the reach of historical narratives, they have also made visible the persistent gaps in representation, authorship, and interpretation. The work of teaching history digitally, therefore, requires more than just translating content into new formats. It demands a critical engagement with the structures that shape digital knowledge production and a commitment to guiding students and public audiences through a more inclusive and reflective understanding of the past.

One of the most visible challenges is the underrepresentation of marginalized voices in digital historical narratives. As highlighted in the Wikipedia article on gender bias, only about 19 percent of English-language biographies on the platform are about women. This imbalance reflects broader patterns of exclusion in both traditional and digital historiography. Wikipedia’s open-editing model offers opportunities for public participation in shaping historical knowledge, but it also means that existing cultural and structural biases often go unchallenged unless deliberately addressed. When students encounter digital encyclopedias or databases, they are rarely encouraged to question who created the content or whose histories remain untold.

The Atlantic’s article “Putting Black History Back in the Record” reveals another layer of this problem. It describes how Black communities have been systematically erased or misrepresented in the historical record and how digitization efforts risk reinforcing these erasures when they prioritize records produced by dominant institutions. While digitization can preserve valuable archival materials, it can also create a false sense of comprehensiveness if educators and users are not trained to examine what is missing critically. In this sense, digital tools can obscure as much as they illuminate.

Yet these same tools also offer unprecedented opportunities to redress such imbalances. The Teachinghistory.org resource, “Beyond the Textbook,” encourages educators to adopt strategies that push beyond standardized narratives and use primary sources in context. Digital platforms can help students explore a broader range of materials, including oral histories, letters, photographs, and maps that are not easily accessible in print. Properly guided, students can learn to trace the construction of historical narratives and identify the silences within them.

The “Living with the Past at Stanford” project provides a compelling example of how digital tools can foster critical engagement with institutional history. By utilizing interactive maps, multimedia storytelling, and layered interpretation, the project invites users to explore the university’s complex past, including its entanglements with issues of race, gender, labor, and land. This approach models how digital tools can help students pose more profound historical questions rather than simply absorbing established accounts. Instead of treating the digital interface as a passive display, the project uses it to provoke inquiry, encourage reflection, and reveal contested meanings.

As history educators, our responsibility is to help students and the broader public navigate these digital landscapes with both curiosity and skepticism. We must train users not only to consume digital history but also to question how it is produced. This involves teaching students to evaluate sources, recognize bias, and understand the power dynamics behind representation. More importantly, it means guiding them toward practices of historical inquiry that see the digital archive not as a finished product but as a space for ongoing intervention and recovery.

Ultimately, digital tools are not neutral. They reflect the priorities of those who build them and the assumptions of those who use them. By acknowledging this, we can turn digital history into a pedagogical opportunity, one that invites

My final project, Paws, Parlors, and Prestige: A Digital Exploration of Victorian Pet Ownership in Britain, is a digital exhibit created for upper-level undergraduates and members of the general public interested in nineteenth-century cultural history. The exhibit explores how pet keeping in Victorian Britain reflected and shaped broader ideas about domestic life, class identity, gender roles, and imperial ideology. Through curated historical images, interpretive captions, and accessible narrative framing, the project presents pets not as decorative or incidental figures but as meaningful actors within the social fabric of the Victorian world.

The exhibit is organized into three thematic sections: “Imperial Creatures,” “Pets and the Domestic Ideal,” and “The Royal Influence.” Each section features a selection of primary sources, including paintings, advertisements, periodicals, and photographs. These sources are interpreted with captions that blend scholarly context and public-facing clarity. I have completed a portion of the research and the digital infrastructure. Progress slowed recently due to travel, but I am now focused on achieving the exhibit text, refining the structure, and guiding viewers through the material in a way that encourages historical thinking.

In the coming weeks, I will continue writing and editing the interpretive text, ensuring each section offers precise framing and thoughtful analysis. I will also create metadata for each primary source to improve accessibility and search functionality. A brief narrative guide will help orient users, and I plan to incorporate reflective prompts to deepen user engagement with the material.

What I have learned about generative AI has also influenced how I approach this project and plan to frame historical inquiry for future users. While AI tools can support basic information retrieval and assist with writing, they cannot replace the work of careful interpretation or thoughtful questioning. I want users to understand the difference between surface-level answers and deeper historical thinking. I plan to include prompts that help users reflect on using AI tools responsibly and critically, and recognize the limitations of algorithmically generated content in understanding the past.

This project is still in development, but I remain committed to producing an exhibit that invites users to think critically about the cultural meaning of pet ownership in Victorian Britain. By combining narrative interpretation with historical sources, I hope to offer an educational, thoughtful, and engaging resource.