I began working on our group project for the year, Visualizing Caribbean Literary Encounters, on November 16. It was my first time working on a project of this kind, and I couldn’t wait to get started. We were currently in the first step of the project, which involved searching for all of the different books produced by Caribbean authors and organising the information in a Zotero folder for simple navigation. Zotero has been of great use with its plugin, which allows the user to save a reading text by pressing a button, and Zotero inputs all of the relevant information about a certain book in an ordered fashion which can be sorted by title or author. Everyone was assigned a time range in which to look for the books, and I chose the years 1951-1960. I began looking for books on Amazon and Goodreads. However, I was unable to locate the majority of the works authored by a specific author. Dr Esprit told us about many online sites that will aid in our research such as Internet Archive and Dloc (Digital Library of the Caribbean). These websites were provided to assist us in locating the texts required to achieve our task. We were also provided other resources that could aid us, such as Google and our lecturer’s own library of literary books. I was able to more easily search for Caribbean authors, all of the books they wrote, and multiple variants of a specific work.
My other interns and I learned about Digital History, which is a novel technique for understanding and representing the past. There are several definitions of digital history, including the one given above and others such as a paradigm framed by these technologies’ hypertextual power. Learning about Digital History was enjoyable. I was also made aware of how the development of new media technologies can contribute to the resolution of historical issues. Word count: 316