Hi my name is Kimani Corbette and I am currently a chemistry and biology major at the Dominica State College. I learned about Create Caribbean through a summer outreach program the organisation had in 2022. I was engaged in interviewing multiple small businesses all over the island to assess their ability to with stand disasters. During this, I learned about the program, how to apply and what it would require of me and I made the decision to apply.
My decision to apply was cemented by a want to acquire new skills and training in a field that I’m not focused on. Create Caribbean is a research-based institution, which uses IT to facilitate a lot of its projects. As a science major, I am not often exposed to these areas so my internship here at create helps with that aspect. Upon completion of the internship, I hope to be well versed in the skills I’m acquiring.
Currently, I am working with The Chronicle and One Seed a Day. With The Chronicle, my main task is to name scanned news paper articles, dating back to 1944 in order to make them easily accessible. With One seed a Day, we are currently developing a website which is intended to broadcast the activities of the organisation.
Being an intern at Create Caribbean takes a lot of hard work and determination, my biggest challenge thus far has been finding the motivation and time to keep up with deadlines and activities. As a double major with an already busy schedule, making time is difficult but I make it work. In the coming year I plan to improve on my time management skills and put more effort into this internship. Thus far, all my expectations in this internship have been met and while I am slightly stressed, I am happier than ever.
My name is Meekalys Louis, I am 17 years old, and I am a first year student at the Dominica State College. I am generally a hard worker but wouldn’t consider myself an overachiever. Currently I am majoring in Business Administration (Marketing). In the future however, I am thinking of going into the sciences and pursuing a Human Biology major.
I learned about Create Caribbean first from a classmate who had been going to the camps. Later, I formally learned about it through a teacher who shared a Facebook post with the class. I chose this program because the field of digital humanities sparked an interest in me. I also hoped to find like-minded individuals through this program, and develop a network of colleagues, mentors, and friends. At the end of this program, I hope to learn research and digital humanities skills. I also hope that this program will continue teaching me critical thinking skills, and exposing me to new thoughts and ideas.
Currently I am working on the Space and Place project. My individual project title is ‘History and Evolution of Dance in the Caribbean Region’.
The most challenging part of this internship is the annotations. It is difficult for me since some of the articles are quite lengthy, and others are more informational so I don’t know how to approach annotating it without echoing what has already been said.
My expectations of the internship would be that there would be more hands-on work. In this regard, the internship has only recently begun meeting my expectations.
I’m not sure if this is considered an improvement, but I would like to be more active in projects come next year. I would like to have more responsibilities as it relates to research, application et cetera.
The new semester began and with it came the continuation of my duty as an intern at Create Caribbean. The new semester came with two main objectives for continuing interns, launching the Visualizing Caribbean Literature (VCL) project and working with our Community Partners. This would take us to a total of ten hours of work each week.
The new aspect of my internship, community partner work, began with myself selecting to work with the Dominica State College (DSC) for safekeeping of alumni’s transcripts. My initial thoughts were that I would be creating a database for these transcripts, which I soon learnt was not the case. In my questioning of the criteria for the database is where I learnt that I would be scanning or transcribing the transcripts. I also went through other things, like my schedule and who my supervisor was in that meeting.
I spent the semester transcribing the water damaged transcripts. In my time doing so I have completed the transcription of the most water damaged book of transcripts and have gotten about halfway with another. Using templates, I created based on the information needed, I was able to average about twenty transcripts in one session of work. These sessions were in the morning and afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The sessions were a tight fit with my school schedule and taking into consideration the bus schedule as well. The sessions of work I do in the mornings and afternoons are minutes before a class and minutes after. On Thursdays I must end these sessions before going to another class in town. Apart from a few days with schedule hiccups my work with my community partner went smoothly, though there are around seven books needing my attention, after those with severe water damage the work should move quicker.
My continued work towards the launch of the VCL project started about mid to late September. I was tasked with creating a checklist for authors who had and who did not have a markdown page, a page on the project’s website. At the completion of the checklist in late October there were 387 entries. From the near completion of the checklist, I started assisting in the creation of markdown pages, but started contributing in earnest from early November. I worked by starting from the bottom of the checklist and moving to the middle, but the number of pages I created is unknown to me. Although,GitHub insights allowed me to see that I made 101 contributions over this semester for those pages. Apart from pages I also assisted in the creation of author data sheets, separate spreadsheets for authors, and checks for genre, languages, and white space for a select number of authors.
Overall, I pushed a good amount of work over the semester, though in certain instances it could have been better in my eyes. It was stressful and tiring at times, but all jobs are, and I am glad I did it. My hope is that my contributions would have made a significant impact and helped further the cause of my community partner and the launch of the Create Caribbean project.
This semester was the most challenging for me this far, however, I believe that I was able to get through it rather well.I went from being a first year student and intern to a second year student and intern in very little time.This semester I was presented with many opportunities that will surely benefit me in one way or another. My main focus this semester was my personal life, working on the Visualising Caribbean Literature Project (VCL), school work and my community partner which was the Waitukubuli writers.
I enrolled in a total of five courses, two courses for my major and three electives. These five courses have allowed me to gain quite a bit of knowledge to help me not only in my current life but in my future professional life as well. Most of my classes were on online platforms therefore I only went on campus for assessments. Though I believe that online learning is very beneficial, there are quite a few disadvantages as well. These include, poor wifi connections, noisy surroundings making it difficult to take part in class discussions and electronic issues, all of which I experienced this semester. This semester I completed a course ‘Professional Development Seminar’, one that I would not have done if it was not a requirement to graduate. However, throughout its completion it became my favorite class that I enrolled in. I practiced writing resumes and cover letters, taking interviews and so much more and I am ready to use what I have learnt some day.
For the VCL project, I was tasked with creating author country markdown pages. It was a rather easy task, because I had access to the spreadsheet, with all of the information that was needed to populate the pages. I found it fascinating to see all the coded pages that I made become actual pages on a site. Additionally I made a few author data sheets, which were used to organize the information about specific authors, so that information could then be used to make markdown pages. My greatest challenge with this however was time management. I found it very difficult to work on the VCL project and complete all that was expected from me in school. I eventually found a way to attend to both my school work, the VCL project and my personal life.
During this semester I also had the opportunity to represent Create Caribbean at The Caribbean Digital IX in Puerto Rico, alongside Dr. Schuyler Esprit and one
of my fellow interns, Zervita Charles. There, I took part in a workshop with Alex Gil, that focused on using digital humanities tools such as Omeka and Wax. I am already familiar with the two, and though the workshop was entirely in Spanish I found it very informative and I gained a lot of knowledge that I can continue to use. On the following day I attended The Caribbean Digital Conference, where several individuals portrayed the Digital Humanities projects that they had been working on. I really enjoyed these presentations, I considered them to be creative and I believe that all of them would in fact be beneficial, to researchers, students, etc. Not only was this an educational experience, but I got an opportunity to meet such amazing people as well, people interested in areas that I’m interested in, and they made the experience even more memorable. I am extremely grateful that I was given this opportunity and I will never take it for granted.
Finally, I worked with my community partner Waitukubuli Writers. It is a registered group of Dominican writers who are passionate about Dominican literature. Their aim is to preserve and showcase the published and unpublished pieces of Dominican authors, poets and playwrights. They gave me the task of creating an Omeka site and a WordPress site. The Omeka site is an interactive and child friendly site that can be used in schools, while the WordPress site will be the Waitukubuli Writers’ official site to publish pieces. So far I haven’t encountered any challenges and I have been making progress.
Overall this semester asked a lot of me , but also gave me many great opportunities, and I was able to complete this semester proudly.
Throughout this semester I was assigned to work with The Chronicle Newspaper, assisting them with the process of digitizing their newspapers. This project was created in an effort to shorten the retrieval process of information stored in newspaper editions. Before a database of the papers can be created, the older newspapers need to be scanned and uploaded into a folder on Google Drive as a temporary repository. Moreover, an inventory of the condition of the different papers was updated where seen fit. Under the guidance of previous interns, I was taught how to properly scan and analyze the condition of the newspapers. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I scanned 20 newspaper issues all from the year 1986. When fulfilling this task, I would check the data in the inventory spreadsheet and compare it to the papers in my presence looking for any discrepancies, which would be corrected in the document upon discovery. I would then scan the pages of the newspaper and upload them to folders that correspond to the newspaper issue.
In an effort to assist with the completion and launching of the Virtualizing Caribbean Literature Project, the first task that I understood was the creation of a list, consisting of the author countries included in the project and whether or not they had a markdown page created already. This list was created utilizing Google Sheets and was stored in the shared drive dedicated to the project. After this, I changed the country permalinks from the country name to the number that was associated with it on the country.json page. Once that task was completed, I created Genre pages for the different genres of works in the collection. Upon completion, I ensured that the name of the author markdown pages and their permalinks were under the same name from the letters ‘a’ to ‘i’. I later assisted in the creation of author data sheets.
In terms of my school work this semester, there was a drastic increase in the coursework and assignments expected to be completed as well as the level of difficulty experienced when compared to last semester. Due to the seven courses taken spread between my double major, at times it was very hectic. The amount of work that needed to be completed depleted much of the free time that I had and overwhelmed me occasionally. Eventually, I got accustomed to my schedule and the demands of my courses. While becoming acclimated to the situation with my studies, I neglected my duties as an intern. I did not complete the vast majority of the hours that I was expected to complete. At that time, I had not thought of how this carelessness would affect the launch of the project (Which it did). After this revelation, I tried pulling my weight by completing tasks that would aid in the completion of the project. I did this by being more consistent with my hours, both those associated with the VCL project and those associated with The Chronicles. This did little to nothing though as the damage was already done and the time allocated to the launch of the project had passed.
This semester was both good and bad due to numerous reasons. As a second year intern I now had to balance school work, my community partner, working on the Visualising Caribbean Literature project and my personal life.
I enrolled in 7 courses this semester which meant a full schedule and a lot of work. Seeing that I am majoring in both economics and hospitality, there was a great amount of things to be done. Some of my coursework included numerous tests, quizzes, assignments, groupworks, problem sets, case studies, models etc. With all this there were also some setbacks such as cancellation of classes, no internet connection and personal issues. Also, most of my classes were on campus therefore I had lots of “ups and downs” to do . To add to this, I had to spend four hours every week working on the Visualising Caribbean Literature project.
My task on the Visualising Caribbean Literature project dealt with author data sheets. Firstly, I had to separate the list into two sections; Authors who had data sheets and Authors who did not have. After this, I then fact checked the authors who had and then started working on completing those who did not have. However, while working there was an issue. The list we were working off of was not updated therefore I had to recheck to identify which authors were on that list. Another task I did was fixing all genre types for authors beginning with the letter “O”.
The next part of this semester was working with my community partner, the Dominica National Archives Unit. This unit is where all materials from the past, business court etc. are stored in hopes of preservation. To gain service learning hours, I spent six hours a week at the unit working on data entries for audio and video cassettes. Most days I entered approximately three boxes of information onto the system whereas other days my entries were a bit fewer. However, starting this project was not easy as there were quite a bit of technical difficulties, thankfully the issue was resolved in the following days. Secondly, I had to complete two hours three times a week and this was very hectic seeing that i had classes both before and after those free two hours. Then, the site crashed so all the work I entered was deleted and I had to re enter everything. That was very frustrating seeing that I could have been working on another box. Lastly, this place was very very cold and seeing that I was coming from the sun and sitting in this cold environment for two hours, I felt sick on numerous occasions and this was not really the best working environment for me. I both enjoyed and did not enjoy this experience due to numerous reasons. I enjoyed this seeing that all I had to do was sit by myself and do the work. On the other hand I did not enjoy this because there were several instances of miscommunication and issues that were uncalled for which made me want to stop, however, I kept it together and returned.
When I first got an email from this institution to become an intern, I was astonished. To be honest, I only knew that Create Caribbean was a research center at the Dominica State College. I was beginning to wonder why should I be chosen to do research when my major is information technology and entrepreneurship. When I got accepted as one of the chosen interns, I asked questions and went on the Create Caribbean page.
For the past months I have leant that this institution is more than just a research institution. At this point I finally understood why my major (Information Technology) was important for this internship program. I learnt that this institution uses information communication technology (ICT), code, geographic locations and the latest research developed tools. Basically, this institution looks at ways to improve our Caribbean countries, and this was done by the use of ArcGIS.
First, the other interns and myself had to help edit and add information to a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet was to be executed via the Carisealand project. The use of ICT was my favorite part, as it allowed me to use my information technology skills.
Doing research was never my thing, but I never hated it. However, after working on the Carisealand project, my research skills have improved and it has enhanced my information technology skills. I plan on learning more about the Caribbean countries, improving my skills on ArcGIS and the Carisealand project.
Preceding the day that I received an email from Create Caribbean, I had no idea what it entailed as I had never even heard of it before. I even thought that the email might have been a mistake, but I am very happy that it wasn’t. After reading its contents, it appeared to me that Create Caribbean was a program which involved only research and data collection, but soon after I was enlightened with the reality that its contents were much deeper. From the very first day upon joining the internship, I learned new things every day about Create. When I gained knowledge that we would look into the aspect of climate change and other global social problems like world hunger and poverty, it enlightened me as this topic has always been of great interest to me.
I have to admit that it was not the smoothest journey in the beginning, as learning how to use the digital tools was very new to me. Being a Math and Biology major, digital technology was not exactly my forte, and I wouldn’t consider myself to be extremely tech savvy. But from experimenting with the tools and re-watching videos on their proper use, I can confidently say that I am getting the hang of it. I am forever grateful for what Create has taught me and what it is teaching me at present.
Through this platform, I have gained awareness and knowledge on the use and applicability of ArcGIS, which I was also unaware about beforehand. Partaking in mapping activities which ranged from inputting location coordinates for places within different countries to writing detailed summaries of Caribbean countries has definitely helped me to gain both experience and the opportunity to apply my newly acquired knowledge. I learned how to use Google Maps in more ways than I could have ever imagined, other than only locating places. I have learned so much more about our culture thus far, including the Creole language and the many changes which have transpired in some of our communities from back then, until today. I also look forward to delving deeper into the history of our communities, specifically in reference to The Lab, and discovering the changes that have occurred.
Create Caribbean is an Institute that preserves the Caribbean culture and heritage. Being an intern at Create means that everyone is tasked with working on research projects on the Caribbean such as mapping. Presently, we are working on a project called the Carisealand project which entails an alternative Caribbean future to sustainable living. It is also a “multi-disciplinary project that explores how Caribbean people navigate the social, environmental and economic impacts of climate change and disaster vulnerability”. Regarding the project, each intern was given a Caribbean country to look up and fill in a spreadsheet the country’s various environmental sites, companies or organizations. We were also tasked to place links and other information into the table for resource purposes.
The country that was assigned to me is Trinidad. Trinidad is a country well known for manufacturing and still it contains great environmental sites. It is also a popular tourist destination in the Caribbean. Gathering information on Trinidad was quite difficult because some organizations and companies which were once active were no longer operating. Additionally, filing in the spreadsheet table took me some time to finish since I had very little time to work on it and the research materials were limited. Other than these minor issues, the project was otherwise easy to complete, fun to research, and increased my knowledge of other countries’ sites and the way they protect their environment.
Finally, without the help and patience of the other interns and instructors, I would be lost and unsure of what was expected of me.
This semester at Create we finally completed the sheet for the mapping of resources in ArcGIS. In addition, I had the opportunity to become more adept in ArcGIS, other mapping software and Twine in my downtime. Going through the spreadsheet gave me greater awareness of places in the Caribbean dedicated to the fight against climate change and how they worked. As a result, I began contemplating how we can break bad habits that are a part of our lifestyle but damage our precious Dominica. In addition, the google algorithm, because of my searches, currently gives me news and updates from the countries I worked on. This makes me more involved in regional news and activities. Seeing the points display on the map properly after all that tedious work really made it worth it.
This semester’s interactions were completely online and low contact, but this did not affect the comfortable atmosphere in meetings or work distribution. At the beginning of lockdown in March, transferring to zoom and online work was difficult, and I expected the same difficulties with the increased online interaction, but it was actually fine despite testing my self-discipline. We began getting into another project that I am very excited about called The Lab. In this project, we envision a sustainable future for the village of Mahaut. I look forward to what’s ahead.
