What about your internship has been an eye-opening (new or unexpected) experience? What were your initial expectations?
The task in which I am engaged seeks to understand the significance and impact of women’s role in medicine and health care broadly. The current iteration is focused on identifying the connections and differences/similarities between national and regional experience. The vehicle for accomplishing this analysis is a comparison between the collections of the Smithsonian Division of Medicine and Science and the Western Reserve Historical Society.
Recognizing there is an entire body of scholarship on collections, who collects, rationale and preservation issues, etc.; this project focuses on what can be determined about women’s action and influence on healthcare through the analysis of two comparable collections: one nationally focused and one regionally focused. There is an assumption that since the Western Reserve Historical Society is a Smithsonian Affiliate, their general standards, practices and goals are similar enough to enable a rough comparison. The unexpected challenge that I am facing is searching the collections effectively. The archives for the institutions are structured quite differently. So while I am sure both institutions have the archival material I need; identifying and collecting these resources has been more time consuming task than anticipated.
This past week I attended an annual Digital Humanities Conference. I considered that even the title is an oxymoron…digital down to the smallest element and humanities which is a full expression of the human experience. As at most academic conferences, new works are presented and the field of study is refined and shaped by the experts and participants who discuss the administrative issues of the year. Since Digital Humanities is a new field, the challenge of framing the language, tools and practices of the discipline is a significant portion of the conference and important work. Identifying standards of expertise and hierarchies are important for remuneration and academic credentialing. However these processes and vocabularies create distances and barriers. What does the public lose? How are the humanities constrained and limited when a group of experts claim control over a field?
The grand institutions claim expertise and protect their collections. The academic disciplines control who can claim authority and expertise. Their commitment is admirable and the services of collection, protection and preservation vital. Yet, both raise obstacles and barriers of access to the very material they are trying to promote. The struggle that I have been facing is frustrating. While I am used to surmounting administrative hurdles, having available resources and yet not having the common language or processes to facilitate their analysis, is a new thing for me.
Have these expectations changed now that you are half-way through? How? Why?
While the task has become more time consuming, I have not given up. Rather, I am widening my understanding and learning the how and why of the institutions with whom I am working. It is our language that expresses our identity and world view. The languages of organizations, fields of expertise and the processes we use express identity and meaning. Communication requires learning these meanings and being able to share them. Researchers are bridges between worlds, crossing into unknown or hidden territory and bringing this new information back to be used in a new way. These challenges are reminding me of the need to make my work transparent and to pay significant attention to how I am communicating the ideas that arise from it.
