First Day of Field Work

This week I have been getting ready for the field work portion of my internship which happened today. This week I was given an assignment to answer a few questions, purpose and goal of project, methods (how did you collect data), background of Florida history, focused on European occupation, especially focusing on Territorial Period and after, and a short couple of lines about what you hypothesize you may see in data collection. The third question I needed to answer is taking longer then I thought due to Florida history being so vast, and me forgetting all I used to know about Florida History which I learned in the fourth grade only. It is all interesting and relevant to the work that I am doing. Depending on the changes going on at the time in the state it can have an effect on the iconography of the marker. A problem I had answering these questions was that I did not make it academic enough, I realized after rereading it was that I wrote it as if I was writing for my blog. I have come accustomed to writing my blog and unintentionally forgot to write in a more academic manner. It has been a little since I have written a paper so I need to practice my writing, because if you are not progressing you are digressing. What I also needed to do was to get volunteers to help me collect the data. In the end I could not get many volunteers to help me collect the data today, but I did have my significant other come to help me put. It was exactly what I was expecting, and it was simple to gather the information that I needed to get. The way I wrote down the information was in sections, each grave that I went to I wrote the number, name, birth date, date of death, material of the marker, and the iconography (the visual images and symbols used in a work of art or the study or interpretation on these). As I was collecting the data I had an idea of how to make my data collection more efficient which is to take pictures of the graves this way I can enter the information straight into excel and even add a hyperlink if possible. I am still dabbling with the program to see what will work and what will not work. It is all about testing the waters with excel it is a testy program that can be useful if one knows how to use it. By no means am I done with this cemetery, but I now understand first hand what needs to be done and just having an example of what I need to do helps me tremendously. Something I noticed while collecting the data was that not all graves are in even columns or rows some are a bit scattered and it can get confusing to follow a specific order. I was told that this cemetery is in a better order then the other one so I will need to be careful not to mix things up, but I am optimistic. I was also given directions to the White cemetery, another cemetery I will be collecting data from. In all today was productive for me and has me enthusiastic about going out again and collecting more data. Monday I will be going out again and I have two volunteers coming to help me out this time instead of one so we will be able to collect more data. 

Here is a photo of me collecting the data, these are concrete covered graves, the one I was working on had no information about the person, no name, gender, birth date, date of death, or iconography. The only information I could gather from it was the material of the grave. In the back was a another concrete covered grave, but it had at least a metal marker with the persons name, and the year they were born and died.