Ok I know this is a lot of weeks, but hang in there with me. During these three weeks, my group and I working with the Heritage Center finished up some of our final pieces of our project, so I was glued to my computer screen, Canva and Instagram to be specific, editing all of the photos and videos that were apart of our social media campaign. I feel like my efforts were not in vain as yesterday I was looking at some of the view and engagement counts on our Instagram page and we were able to reach over 3,000 people in just about a month, which I feel is pretty successful!
A group member of course helped me with this and our other two members, God bless them, created a fantastic website with a digital collection with the photos we received from the Heritage Center. They also found some cool plug-ins so we could have a map and commenting feature to hit some more of our public engagement targets.
Then it was time to turn it in and oh boy was I a bit nervous. Some ideas we had we didn’t have time to get to, and while that can be a bit disappointing, I think we managed to pull off a pretty good representation of what the intention of our project was. We received some feedback from Dr. McClurken and lo and behold it really wasn’t that bad. One of the notes I got for the Instagram was “Let’s talk next steps” which was I have to say a little ominous but you know it could’ve been worse. We also wrote our summary page that will be hosted on the UMW Digital History website.
This week, my group and I have been working on finalizing some of our revisions, handing off the accounts to our friends at the Heritage Center, and working on our presentation that we’ll be doing at the History, American Studies, and Sociology symposium! This is the first time I’ll be a presenter at one of these so I’m very excited.
Stay tuned for some of my final thoughts on the project and overall experience as a student of Digital History, but for now, check out the summary of my group project in my recent blog posts! A Summary of Our Heritage Center Project