One of the most important things I learned this semester is that slow progress is still progress. At the beginning of the semester, if I found that I didn’t have as much time to complete a task as I thought I would, my tendency was to postpone it to another day or time, instead of doing what I could in the slot that was remaining. That strategy wasn’t effective for my classes, nor was it effective for my Vivero work, because I found myself accumulating things that would take chunks of time out of my day.
Subsequently, the advice that I would give my younger Vivero self is this: While it’s good to plan out how you want a 1-hour work session to play out, keep in mind (and maybe written down) the list of smaller tasks that comprise the 1-hour workflow. That way, if you have 15 minutes to get things done, you can pick out one or two of those smaller tasks so that you are still making progress towards the big goal.
The training model worked well for me, I think. All the exercises were well-explained; the instructions were unambiguous and therefore easy to follow. As I look back on the ‘Documentation’ training we completed, I appreciate more how much work went into creating those training guides for each digital tool we went through.
Next semester, I won’t be working with Vivero or on the Native History Project because I plan to study abroad, but the documentation that I created this semester is shared with everyone involved with administrating the Native History website. The Taino unit is almost finished – a surreal thought to have! – and Leo and I are working to wrap things up next week. The Lesson 5 documents are the last ones to be created, and all the documents from Lessons 1 to 4 need to be revised and edited, which is hopefully what I will spend next week doing. It’s amazing to think that my work conceptualizing this unit and then creating lesson plans, teacher guides, and presentations is going to be publicly available to help real-life educators. I’m really proud of that, and I am grateful for everything I have learned from Professor Michaels in the process – and Leo, later.
Through my Vivero experience, WordPress has caught my attention. I started playing around with the Elementor plugin before the semester got busier, and I think it would be nice to go back to spending time on that. I would also like to spend more time learning and using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab and Voyant because I didn’t really get to interact with them much, outside of completing trainings. I love seeing digital humanities in action and look forward to incorporating those tools in personal projects I undertake in the future.