When I heard about the opportunity to be part of The Norman Sicily Project, I was immediately interested in learning more. After reading the job description, I was even more eager to apply and I was beyond thrilled when I was offered a position on the team. Being a history major, with a particular interest in medieval Italian history, I was captivated by the pictures of the ornate details of the monasteries and churches. Prior to beginning my work on the project, I had some knowledge of what historical research entails. However, participating in this project has taught me more than I had ever expected. Not only have I been able to utilize and improve my research skills, I have also learned what it means to be part of a scholarly research team. Along with three other undergrads at Montclair State University, I have been contributing to the project. Initially, my first tasks were to catalogue images of the extraordinary Norman medieval monasteries found across Sicily, which included identifying the contents of each photograph, date visited, and more. Before beginning, the other students and I underwent a weekend of training so that we understood the complexities of working with and cataloging the historical data that we were about to encounter. The highlight of this stage in the project, for me, was to view photographs of the variety of monasteries found throughout different regions of Sicily and the ability to see the magnitude and cultural richness of the sites and their remains.

Throughout my time working with The Norman Sicily Project, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about so many different areas of study that I never would have experienced otherwise. Recently, I’ve been working on confirming the existence of the churches during the Norman period. In these past few weeks, I’ve gotten a glimpse at how historians use sources for their research. I had no idea how hard this was until I had to do it myself. It is extremely difficult to find the information that this site contains, since it all comes from different sources, which are often hard to track down or in another language.

In my journey with The Norman Sicily Project, the nature of my work has grown alongside the project’s progression. In this evolution, I have been given a number of invaluable opportunities to learn new skills and refine pre-existing ones. The process of cataloging and assigning metadata to images has improved my organizational abilities and understanding of file structures. This facet of the job has been incredibly beneficial to my aspirations of working in the post-production aspect of filmmaking- a department where organization is not only key, but, has the force of scripture. My capacity to concisely describe images has also proven to be an asset of the same function. With the completion of the image portion of the project, I have more recently been assigned to a heavily research-oriented task.