For my internship in this program, I am working with the Fairfax County Judicial Learning Center to create a digital exhibit on important court cases from the county’s history. The Judicial Learning Center is a part of the Fairfax County Circuit Court Historic Records Center which is heavily involved in local educational programs. From the Center’s website, their stated mission is using sources from the archives to foster public awareness about how the local judicial system functions and its historic role in American civil rights history. Their overarching emphasis is on education for middle- and high-school groups. So far, I have mainly been introduced to the individuals that I will be contacting in the Center, while doing some personal background research into the event as a whole – the internship largely starts this week. For my part, I am pleased that I am still able to utilize my interests in English/literary history for this research prompt.

Although I do not have an official ‘role’ in the organization itself, I am a remote intern who will work with the Center’s staff and resources to create content for them. As with some of the other online exhibits created by History students, I will be in constant contact with the Center to research, write, and create a digital exhibit on some high-profile cases in Fairfax County history. Specifically, I will be writing about a civil rights case involving library censorship in the 1960s, which will demonstrate how the local court approached concerns of supposed ‘subversive’ media and libraries’ freedom to engage the public. Naturally, this is in line with the Center’s mission of educating the public about important civil-rights history within the local court system: my exhibit will demonstrate how places of communal importance, namely libraries, can be besieged by adverse social forces (in this case, the Red Scare) as well as showing how they can defend against them in the interest of the public good. When it is finished, my exhibit will join the other examples of important civil-rights cases in the history of Fairfax County, illustrating the role of the judicial branch in these developments.

Overall, my main learning goal is to understand how to truly apply the skills I have been studying in this program so far. Heretofore, the program helped me apply my undergraduate studies in History and English into specific skillsets for the Digital Public Humanities field. Chiefly, I want to be able to fully apply my research and writing skills for larger-scale projects that involve teamwork and coordination. I have already learned how to use certain digital tools like Voyant and Omeka for my own personal projects, so I hope to use this opportunity to gain experience in applying them in a team-based, professional setting. The most important aspect of this opportunity for me is using these skills for a specific professional goal, which is the mission of the Judicial Learning Center. When this internship is finished, I hope that my contribution will be educationally valuable.