Week of 5/31-6/04 Internship blog

I made some good progress this week, despite it being a short one because of Memorial Day. I have continued both of my projects, and along with my supervisor made some updates to the foundation's social media.

Firstly, I have almost finished writing captions for the movie theater exhibit and have decided which photos I would like to display with them. I will go through the relevant material once more, fact check what I have written, decide if I need to add more, and see if there are any photos that can better tell the story than those I have selected so far. A lot of research has been done previously on the theaters of Winter Garden and as a result I have had a much easier time finding information compared to my other project, Winter Garden at Work.

The main focus of my research for Winter Garden at Work up until this point has been the Citrus industry, along with the first stores in the town and the railroads. There is plenty of information about the first citrus growers in Central Florida, of course. The trouble begins with the lack of objects or images to go along with the history. The beginning of any story is one of the (if not the) most important or interesting parts and so it is necessary for it to be told in the exhibit. However, I don't want a large part of the exhibit to just be text I have written up summarizing the history, there needs to be a visible or tangible aspect to it. This is a problem that I will have to solve next week. I have only begun researching the railroads of Winter Garden. It seems really exciting. A Russian man named Peter Demens is a key figure in the history of the railroads in Central Florida, at least in the beginning. He seems to have been a bit of an eccentric and his whole story is very interesting and one that I am looking forward to researching and telling.

As with last week, the Twitter page for the foundation has been updated. Now it is linked with the foundation's Facebook page, which is quite popular. I still have more ideas of how to cross-promote the Twitter account to get the ball rolling, but hopefully we see some growth.

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