The CEDISH team had the pleasure of working with two student interns during the 2025 and 2026 academic years in support of The Sounds of San Antonio. Marisela Cruz and Jamie Thomas blogged about their experiences and reflections on the project, sharing what they learned, the work they contributed, and the impact the internship had on their academic and professional development.
When I first applied for the student library assistant position at UTSA libraries Community Engaged Digital Scholarship Hub, I expected a predictable job. I imagined shelves of dust-free books, the soft hum of fluorescent lights, and a lot of alphabetizing. I did not imagine I’d be knee-deep in GitHub repositories, learning the coding language Python to geolocate a punk venue that closed in 1978. But that’s exactly what the Sounds of San Anto project gave me.
For those unfamiliar, Sounds of San Anto it is an ambitious digital humanities project housed at UTSA. Created by the CEDISH team, the project aims to map, archive, and celebrate the diverse musical history of San Antonio—from Tejano conjunto to West Side punk, from ’60s garage rock to the vibrant hip-hop of the Eastside. And I got to help build the engine behind it.
I became a contributor to a real, live GitHub repository. Coming from a humanities background, coding felt intimidating at first. But my mentors at CEDISH didn’t just hand me a manual—they showed me how collaborative coding works. I learned to input messages, open issues, and write out instructions in the Python language. GitHub became our project’s shared brain, tracking every annotation, every fixed coordinate, and every line of metadata. It was my first real taste of open-source collaboration, and it made me feel less like a student and more like a junior developer.
You’d be shocked how messy history can be. One venue might be listed as “Kelly Field” on a flyer, “Kelly Field Terrace” in a directory, and just “Kelly Terrace” in an interview. Matching those to a single location? That’s where archival came in. I went into the UTSA libraries data base and sifted through San Antonio Express-News newspapers from the1950s to the 1990s. I was able to become more familiar with obtaining data for the project’s interactive map, which was a thrilling experience.
San Antonio changes: streets get rename and buildings get demolished. A club that hosted Selena’s early shows might now be a car wash location. But one of my favorite tasks was “finding lost locations.” I’d start with an interview snippet, then cross-reference with online location finding tools and finally come to find an address that is not documented anywhere else.
My time at CEDISH wasn’t just a student job. It was an education in public history, digital methods, and community-centered storytelling. I leave with a working knowledge of Git and Python, the ability to find a lost address using archives and intuition, dozens of new favorite local bands, and a deep respect for the people who made San Antonio’s music scene—then and now.