Lexi McCloud - Vermont Folklife Internship Blog: Summer 2026, Week 1

Vermont Folklife’s mission is to deepen Vermonters’ understanding of each other by engaging with communities across the state to document and share everyday expressions of tradition, innovation, and culture.

On May 18th 2026, I began my summer internship at the Vermont Folklife office in Burlington, Vermont. I am participating in this internship through Berea College, where I’m currently in the process of earning my BA in history. 

I arrived at the office on my first day and met with my Internship supervisor, Mary Wesley, who is Vermont Folklife’s Director of Education and Media. We sat down so she could give me the lay of the land and familiarize me with the day-to-day work of VF. We discussed some of the work I could jump right into, including going through the Farm Series, which is a collection of oral history interviews done by folklorist Dr. Gregory Sharrow of Vermont Folklife in the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s. One of the main goals of going through these recordings and transcripts is to identify a set of keywords relevant to each interview so that they can be used in building a more searchable, user-friendly database of the Vermont Folklife digital archival materials. The hope is that by helping to comb through this series, we can create a framework that will be of service to future researchers. I’m really excited to be a part of making the Farm Series more generally accessible; I believe these oral histories have tremendous value, not only for Vermont, but also for a larger national and even global story of rural life. 

Another project that Mary and I discussed includes working on correcting the transcripts of Vermont Folklife’s Gather ‘Round interviews. These recordings were done to document music and songs of childhood that are meaningful to current cultural communities across Vermont. The recordings were transcribed through a program called Trint; my role will be to listen through the recordings and remedy any mistakes the program may have made in creating the transcripts.  

I will also hopefully be doing some fieldwork over the course of this internship, like collecting short audio clips. As of now, the possibilities we have discussed for potential projects to fill the summer are quite expansive, and I’m excited to see how the aims of my work here grow and change as I get into the rhythm of things.