One of the first things the faculty said to the incoming MAs this year was to be aware, but not afraid, of imposter syndrome.
Up until now, I had never known that this feeling had a name but I had definitely felt it! In undergraduate tutorial or seminar discussions whenever a classmate had gotten an idea or notion from a reading that I hadn't considered or in college when my classmates would get the hang of an assignment much faster than I did - I was constantly questioning whether I had picked the right field of study or if a grave mistake had been made in my acceptance to the program.
With the new name for this feeling and my first week of classes under my belt now, I can say that this year will be a welcomed challenge! While I have reservations about some projects, including having to conduct formal oral history interviews for the first time, I'm mostly excited to engage with various methods, new and familiar, for "doing history."
One thing I really love about the Public History program thus far is how interconnected the classes are. It is really easy to see some places where content learned in one class can be directly applied to a project in another class. One example in particular that I have noticed is the Digital Resource Presentations many of us will be doing for our Understanding Archives course that will overlap with some of the sources we will have looked at in Digital Public History. It will be interesting to see the variety of digital resources my classmates find and choose to discuss.
Digital Public History is something I have become increasingly interested in over the past few years. Having had a few opportunities recently to participate in digitization projects, it has been really interesting to follow Library and Archives Canada's undertaking of digitizing their entire collection of First World War soldiers' files for public access over the past four years or so.
Crowdsourcing has also become an area of interest for me in the realm of digital public history so I am really looking forward to exploring it more throughout the program. As I mentioned in my first post, I volunteered as a transcriptionist for the Confederation Debates project, which is a digital history project that I have really enjoyed getting to see develop over the last 3 years or so. In many of my professional and volunteer positions in the museum industry, I have been tasked with digitization, either of artefacts or archival materials, mainly for database purposes. Digital history projects like the Confederation Debates, is a great example of a way digitization makes history more accessible to the general public.
And lastly, a shameless plug for the Defining Moments Canada project, a digital initiative to crowdsource stories missing from most Canadian history classes. This year's project is on the 100th Anniversary of the Spanish Flu Pandemic (1918-1919) and I'm super excited to see the stories and digital content that is created by this project!
Further reading:
Imposter Syndrome
http://time.com/4260364/imposter-syndrome-youre-not-crazy/
LAC's WWI Digitization Project
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ww-i-soldiers-files-being-digitized-by-library-and-archives-canada-1.2879590
https://globalnews.ca/news/3038437/remembrance-day-2016-more-than-half-of-first-world-war-records-now-online/
http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/news/Pages/2018/First-World-War-database-completed.aspx
Defining Moments Canada
http://activehistory.ca/2018/01/going-viral-spreading-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-spanish-flu-pandemic-one-story-at-a-time/
http://activehistory.ca/2018/01/what-is-forgotten-influenzas-reverberations-in-post-war-canada/
http://activehistory.ca/2018/01/commemorating-the-forgotten-plague-through-the-classroom/
http://activehistory.ca/2018/02/piecing-together-a-pandemic-unearthing-elusive-eclectic-authentic-stories-of-the-flu/
http://www.huronresearch.ca/communityhistory/defining-moments-canada/