For my ASL experience, I took part in three projects. The first project was called “Every Name Counts”. This was the most important of the three to me as it related to me personally as a Jew. This project displayed to me documents of prisoners and ultimate victims taken by the Nazi Party during World War II. The documents display their names, family members, occupations, religion, nationality, and how they were imprisoned. Not all the documents were those of Jews, as there were also many Roman Catholics but as we know, six million Jews were murdered during the War. I had to transfer these details into a “typed format” so they can be digitized. This project helps ensure that these millions of names can be easily found in an online archive, a similar idea to the Hart Island Project. It allows easier access to information for the descendants of these victims, reunite descendants of families that were torn apart during this time, and helps to acknowledge each and every name when there are millions that need to be remembered. I do not personally have any relatives that are either Holocaust survivors or victims, but I have met many that do and heard from survivors first-hand. If we don’t want history to repeat itself, steps such as this need to be taken so we learn from the past’s atrocities and prevent them from happening again. I always try to carefully listen to their stories, remember them so I can pass them on to future generations, and continue the goal of remembering as many families as possible. 

      The second project I took part in was called “Penguin Watch”. Penguin populations are under threat worldwide and are already in decline in many regions. I am given different camera images of a group of penguins in a specific environment. Later, I was shown the same environment but at a different time. The task was to mark each picture with the number of adult penguins, chicks, eggs, or other animals that I saw in each picture. This data can help exhibit the changes in the population of penguins in each environment, and possibly why that is occurring. Changes in a penguin’s population can reflect changes occurring in the wider ecosystem as well. Penguins in addition to all seabirds are used to detect early warning of risks to key ecosystems and the effects that humans have, as they are key to the marine environment. The population of these animals is declining worldwide due to climate change, pollution, and human interference. Penguins in different environments will be affected by different threats, but this data helps to better monitor, understand, and protect these species to some extent. For example, Antarctica is facing a growing concern from the effects of climate change, as it has been rapidly warming which results in the melting of shelves of ice. This data can then be used to help inform policy changes that are needed throughout the world to prevent the complete extinction of penguins and other species. Even small steps such as this can result in changes on a bigger scale, so I hope I can participate in more data collecting projects with other animals and raise awareness on these issues that need to be repaired imminently. 

      The last project that interested me was “Galaxy Zoo”. In this project, real telescopic images of galaxies were displayed, and I had to answer questions on these images based on each galaxy’s size, shape, and any other features that were seen interacting with or around the galaxy. There are so many galaxies both near and far, and projects such as these are attempting to help further understand how they interact with their surroundings and what galaxies can tell us about the past, present, and future of the universe in general. For example, if a galaxy has a spiral shape, it shows that there is a rotating disk of stars, or if it looks like a big ball of stars, it shows that there has been a previous collision between smaller galaxies over long periods of time. The universe is so vast and incredible to me, and I chose this project to learn some more about the incredible things that are miles and miles away from us here on earth. Some of the features of the universe are so difficult to comprehend to us as of now, so I hope with projects such as these and collecting more data about parts of the universe we have already seen or learned about, can result in better understandings of what is out there and how it functions, because to me it is such an interesting concept to think about.

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