Documenting Florida's RICHES

I've enjoyed "getting to know" the Academy Award-winning underwater videographer and scuba diving pioneer Jordan Klein, Sr. this week as I transcribed his oral history interview with the RICHES team!  Geoff Cravero and Dr. Connie Lester set high expectations when they described this interview as one of their all-time favorites, and it certainly has not disappointed.  I have also learned a lot about the rewarding, if at times agonizing, process of oral history transcription. Jordan Klein, Sr. grew up in Miami, Florida and began diving when he was a young boy.  Upon his return from serving in the navy during World War II, he opened a diving boat business.  After experimenting with ways to adapt commercially available cameras for use underwater, in 1954, Klein developed the Mako Shark "amphibious underwater camera," which was the first underwater camera that was widely available for purchase.  Klein later filmed and created underwater props and sets for films and c

This week, I will begin work on a new internship project: transcribing an oral history interview!  While I've worked with archival collections that included oral histories, this is my first experience formally transcribing them.  I've always found oral history to be a particularly fascinating component of public history work, and had been hoping to gain additional experience with it through my UCF History MA coursework and public history internships.   An oral history , for those who aren't familiar with the term, is "an interview that records an individual's personal recollections of the past and historical events... [or] "the audio or video recordings, transcripts, and other materials that capture and are associated with such an interview." (1)  These records are particularly important in researching, documenting, and interpreting the history of what public historians call underrepresented populations , which are individuals and groups whose stories are

One of the aspects of my internship that I've enjoyed the most is the highly collaborative nature of the projects I'm working on.  I get to attend the weekly RICHES staff meetings (via Zoom, thanks to the pandemic), and it is very interesting to get a glimpse at how each member of the team contributes to the program's goals, and the variety of tasks that go into developing, maintaining, and marketing a digital repository.   RICHES team members discuss their work with outreach, collections development, tech wizardry, digital collections management and metadata creation, and communications, as well conducting oral histories, coordinating events, applying for grants, and contributing to department- and university-wide initiatives.  Given this list of responsibilities, you might expect the meeting attendance to be enormous, but there are usually around five faculty and staff members at each meeting.  You can find a of team members and their biographies here. I find it particula

One of the most difficult aspects of my internship has been working on the section of the upcoming Bending Toward Justice digital exhibit that focuses on the Ocoee Massacre, which I have found challenging in many ways.  I've been particularly frustrated at how much is still unknown about the Ocoee Massacre--even such seemingly basic facts as how many people died.  While we know that at there were at least three deaths, estimates of the total number range as high as 300.  This was mind-boggling to me: how, in this age of online research and text-searchable databases and millions of records available at the click of a mouse, do we simply not know ? The lack of concrete information is especially striking when one considers how small the town of Ocoee, Florida was in 1920.  The 1920 United States Federal Census counted 815 residents of Ocoee, including 257 Black and 558 white residents.  (After the exodus of Black citizens from Ocoee following the Massacre, the 1930 census counted only

This week, I continued to work on the upcoming Bending Toward Justice (BTJ) digital exhibit on Voter Rights and Voter Suppression in Florida, which is scheduled to go live in November.  In particular, I have been assessing and creating a summary of the many research materials that BTJ team members have collected that document the Ocoee Massacre.  These materials include newspaper articles, oral history interviews, a thesis, photographs, etc.  I will then develop ideas for transforming the wealth of research into an exhibit. I found the first part of this task to be familiar and pleasant, but the second has proved to be thornier for me.  As an archivist, I am used to organizing, assessing, and summarizing collections content.  However, as a neophyte historian, I have an unfortunate tendency to gather too much research material and then find myself struggling to winnow and distill the mass of data into a cogent, concise final product.  In an exhibit, this is an especially critical step,

I took a bit of a break from metadata this week in order to begin working on a new RICHES initiative called Bending Toward Justice: Documenting the Struggle for Political, Economic, and Social Equality .   The primary deliverable from the Bending Toward Justice project will be a multifaceted, multi-year online exhibit that uses documents, maps, photographs, oral histories, and secondary sources to explore the history of racial inequality in Florida.  RICHES will be coordinating with community groups and academic partners such as the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) to develop the exhibit website.   Clearly, the subject matter could not be more timely, as we are about to enter the second weekend of protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.  It has been incredibly moving to read research articles in support of a project about the history of racial inequality and injustice while NPR updates and interviews about the Black Lives Matter Move