Each year we ask our interns to write a post reflecting on their time working in the DH Lab. Here is Dorothea’s

My name is Dorothea, and I’m a third-year History student now coming to the end of my internship here at the Digital Humanities Lab. It’s been my dream since college to work in archives and records management, so when I saw an opportunity to learn all about digitisation and work with lots of archival collections in the process, I dived into it headfirst. It’s been an amazing experience.

From the outset, I knew I wanted to learn how to digitise physical, audio-visual storage materials like VHS and cassette tapes. My most formative early experience with archives was as a researcher in college, finding out that an interview recorded on tape had been lost forever. With the skills I’ve gained from working with the library’s collection of VHS tapes, I feel confident in my ability to digitise and preserve any similar materials I may work with in the future.

The project I’m probably most proud of though, is my work on the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME) alongside my colleague Emily Pardo. We worked together to digitise a whole host of historical material held by the University’s Special Collections from and about the Middle East created throughout the twentieth century – from survey maps and posters to photographic negatives. A particular focus for me were the many ‘Free Palestine’ newspapers of the 70s and 80s held in the collection. I worked to not only photograph them, but to turn those photographs into searchable PDFs – which are now more accessible than ever on the DAME webpages.

I’m so thankful to everyone in the team, and to all my fellow interns for the wonderful experience I’ve had at the Digital Humanities Lab this year. I’ll never forget all the amazing skills I learnt, nor the exciting projects I worked on here, and I certainly won’t forget the warm memories I made in the process.