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  2020-08-19

  Portfolio of a JOPL Intern, Summer 2020, Lyn Ribisi

  This is my portfolio for my 15 weeks as an intern working with The Journal of the Plague Year. I was anxious to learn the skills involved in gathering, creating, and archiving materials to preserve history in our lifetime. The pandemic of COVID-19 is a once in a century occurrence, and I felt it was very important to preserve our thoughts, emotions, photographs, jokes, and events that are shaping our lives now. Generally, I’ve been fascinated by archives and the potential they hold for telling our stories. I’ve also been frustrated by the lack of accessibility they all present. I’m hoping that the digital archive techniques we have employed will ease that problem. We’ve had the freedom to use tags (or, in archive-speak, folksonomy) to make the content searchable and accessible to all who come after us. In addition to archive work, my branch of historical interest is in the everyday lives of people. This digital repository satisfies both passions. Lastly, working on preserving the events of this pandemic has helped me find my way during this difficult time. I feel that I've been able to contribute--at least a little bit--and thus been able to be causative over some little part of this global nightmare. I am earning my Master’s degree in order to teach at the college where I work now. I’ve been functioning as a TA for the last several years as well as working as a classified staff member. I should graduate in May 2021, and become an adjunct. However, with all learning remote and the campus closed, hiring may be delayed. My mission is to inspire a love of history and the ability to think critically about the past and present. Too often history is still being taught as a memorization exercise of dates, names, and events. I will teach against that model and hopefully inspire a love of the past and its lessons and stories in my students. I want to thank all of our staff at ASU for delivering a professional learning experience—I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to be a part of it.