Note: Because my internship with the CHNM spans two different projects – Pandemic Religion this semester and the Appalachian Trail project next – this blog post addresses prompt six.
What skills or knowledge from your coursework are you using in your internship?
Metadata.
I’ve updated metadata in existing items and also added metadata to new items in the Pandemic Religion collections. I never gave any thought to metadata, mainly because I had no idea what it was before this program. But now I know and use it regularly in my online work!
Omeka S.
The Pandemic Religion project is built in Omeka S, which is similar enough to the original Omeka that I found the learning curve to be very minor. However, without the foundation that this program has provided, I suspect that my learning curve would’ve been noticeably steeper.
Historical thinking.
I was looking back through some of my blog posts from History 689 and came across one about the elements of historical thinking that have remained at the heart of history teaching. I wrote this:
It’s easy to talk theoretically about affecting positive change via historical thinking, but how do we actually do it? Start with teaching students that history is all about interpretation because that’s the truth. But interpretation isn’t just opinion – it’s about exploring historical evidence, cause and effect, context. It’s complicated! And that’s what students need to understand. History isn’t about what you know and how much you memorize; it’s about how you think.
In the Pandemic Religion project, we’re not just watching an online church service, for example. We’re asking questions like, What’s the service’s message? How is the religious institution adapting and adjusting to the pandemic? What factors are driving their decisions? What’s the greater historical context? If we look at a religious institution’s online presence in March compared to today, things are likely going to look and sound a bit different because the greater historical context has changed over the past several months. From the pandemic’s ongoing grips on communities across the country, to the presidential election (which, believe it or not, is part of the COVID-19 conversation in a lot of churches), to church outbreaks, to the gaining confidence in conducting virtual operations and taking advantage of the available technologies.
I think that this way of engaging in historical thinking is what makes the Pandemic Religion project both challenging and stimulating. We’re present historians living in a powerfully historical moment, preserving artifacts for future historians, and yet also trying to interpret this growing collection of items in a thoughtful way for diverse current audiences.
Have you noticed a difference between theory and practice? Why or why not?
Yes and no! For instance, I see a difference when it comes to Pandemic Religion’s audience, but I think that Carl Becker’s Everyman His Own Historian still holds true today, in both theory and practice.
Audience.
One thing that stands out when reflecting on all of the program’s readings and activities is that we’re trained, for the most part, to look back, collect, analyze, interpret, and share/disseminate history. Again, with the Pandemic Religion project, we’re doing all of those things but instead of looking back, we’re looking forward. How can we help future audiences? Future historians? What kinds of questions are future generations going to have about the COVID-19 pandemic and how religious institutions coped? It’s been a surprisingly challenging way of looking at history and considering your audience.
Carl Becker.
In History 690, we read Carl Becker’s presidential address for the American Historical Association in 1931. In it, Becker “called for historical practice that shared inquiry and authority with ‘everyman,’ the ordinary citizen historians aspired to serve. Every person used history every day to make sense of the world, whether professional historians helped or not.”
I think that this concept gets to the heart of how I see the Pandemic Religion project. We’re relying on the average person to share their experiences of living through the COVID-19 pandemic and how they’ve been affected – that’s the first part.
The second part is almost this camaraderie with the past. I think that a lot of us have looked to the 1918 Spanish Flu, hoping, perhaps, to leverage history to make sense of the present world, just as Becker said.
