Because of my internship, I am now much more confident in what I want to do with my history career moving forward as well having the skills necessary to do it.
For the past decade or so, I have known I wanted to work with history in some capacity, weather that be as a professor, a museum curator, an archaeologist, or an author. As an undergraduate, I began to narrow those down over time as I started to seriously consider what I wanted to do with my future, and almost every class I have taken since then has either guided me towards a particular sector of the field or away from one. In the case of the Digital Public Humanities certificate program and Dr. Otis’ death by Numbers project, I found a surprising niche which satisfied two of my interests at once. I love history, and I have always been very detail oriented and somewhat OCD, and transcribing these mortality records allowed me to see myself as a professional transcriber perhaps for a private organization or a large historical institution. Very quickly after I started performing this work, I actually found myself, somewhat contradictingly, looking forward to it after a long day of work. As funny as that may sound, transcribing is almost like a form of therapy for me, and it occupied my mind in such a way that it didn’t allow me to worry or overthink about anything else in my life. It may seem slightly morbid given the subject matter of this project, however I believe that the work of a transcriber requires a level separation from the content in order to avoid distractions and produce the best quality work.
Beyond its “therapeutic” qualities, this internship has given me a comprehensive education on not only many aspects surrounding medical and cultural life in Early Modern England, but has also boosted my confidence immensely when it comes to the technological side of the field. I already considered myself to be “tech savvy” for the most part, however I had never really done digital public humanity work as part of a team. this internship gave me that opportunity, and allowed me to consider the possibilities of working with a more digital aspect of history. I have already begun to take some of the lessons I learned from the Death by Numbers project and use them in my work outside of school as director of the Marconi Museum. I believe as digital humanist and historians, it is our responsibility to carry the field into the future, which is increasingly reliant on technologies such as AI and LLM’s. I am not sure what the future of digital history will look like, but I am certain that I want to be a part of it.
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