Hi, my name is Audrey Schroeder. I am a graduate student at GMU working towards a degree in history with an applied concentration. As of right now, I am going into my third full semester this coming fall. My overall goal for my degree is to pursue a museum career. I have loved museums since I was a kid, and it would be my dream to create exhibits as a career. This past semester, I took Museum Studies and learned a lot about creating workable exhibits for visitors. However, I want to learn more from this class about better incorporating educational elements into future physical and digital exhibits. In the last course, I worked with Omeka to create a contributory website with educational elements. I want to expand on the educational aspects and become more proficient in that skill, and I hope this class will help me achieve that.

This course and project have been an eye-opening experience for me. Going into the course this semester, I felt confident. What I learned the previous semester in Intro to Digital Humanities made me think that I was ready to create different digital projects. However, I soon discovered that I still had much to learn. One of the significant aspects of this course was learning about the importance of audiences. I was ready to dive head-first into creating my project.

Nevertheless, learning about different audiences made me step back and think. The audience I want to create a project for will influence how I design it. Thinking about the project I created, if I had gone in without thinking about the audience, it would not have been a successful project. I knew that I wanted to create a collaborative project to start a conversation on the memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial. I could have just created a simple website that allowed users to do that. However, learning about audiences this semester changed my thinking and planning. I realized that just making that website as I had initially planned would not be successful. Some of that audience might have yet to go to the memorial and want to learn more about it before giving their story. It also made me realize that other audiences might use this website. Other people might want to keep their stories private and will strictly visit the site to learn about the history. Thinking about this audience helped me understand that I needed to add more, and that created a more well-rounded and more prosperous project. In the future, I will always think about that before I start creating a project. Last semester, I did not even think about who the audience might be, and now I wonder if I had if it would have created a better project. It might have changed what I would include or even added more to what is already there. Learning about the importance of audiences changed how I approach digital projects and how to make them successful.