By Mikayah Antonio
Here at Create Caribbean we undertake many different projects, each having their own unique requirements. Currently, I am working extensively on the Carisealand project. Apart from my mapping duties, I have been given the task to research and present on the topic Marine Life.
Mapping, is the general term I use to describe my contribution to the project, however my work isn’t limited to the definition of this term. Thus far, I have successfully added all available items to Omeka. Furthermore, I have also mapped them onto Neatline. These items consist of various companies, sites, shops
and lands marks of interest in different Caribbean countries pertaining to environmental sustainability. Though tedious at times, I found little difficulty in doing such. Eventually, I was aided by a few of my fellow interns, thus hastening the process.
My research on my topic, however, follows a different path. Though research has proven to be quite interesting and somewhat easy to acquire, finding persons who can speak on on sub topics like coral bleaching, for example, from a professional point of view has been problematic.
Despite this challenge, with aid from my superiors, I was able to structure my content in ways that accommodate the sources I am able to utilize. So far, I have accumulated vast amounts of raw
information on the different subtopics, some of which I have made sense of and used to transition between these subtopics. As a side project under my research, I have created a story map showing
entities in charge of legislature or policy in respect to marine life of each island, and their respective marine reserves and dive sites. Though both my projects and research are far from completion, I am moving at a steady pace and don’t see completion as something far ahead.