The 13th week of my Spring PRINT internship was very similar to the 12th. The majority of the work I completed was a continuation of what I had had done last week, though there were some unique challenges I encountered.
On Monday and Wednesday, I continued my work on discovering and entering AFSt receiver place names on Endnote. I used the process I perfected last week, first checking the abstract before looking at the original document in the “AFSt renamed” folder on Teams. I have developed a great eye for finding the place names on the envelopes, regardless of their spelling or illegibility. Since I have seen the place names so many times from the same authors, I can much more easily identify places such as Halle, Augsburg, and Glaucha. Some of the places were still quite difficult to identify, but the Francke Foundations website as well as the website for Deutsche Biographie gave me most of the information I needed to find out where receivers had been in a certain time period. Astrid and I completed all of the batches quite early in the week, so I spent the rest of my time going over the places we had accidentally skipped over. For the documents that were not sent letters or didn’t have any sort of receiver, we left the column for receiver place blank.
The German transcription workshop was quite fun, as we made incredible progress on the transcription of a letter. While at the beginning of the semester, I was only able to get a line or two done during the hour, I am now able to do entire documents. While I am not quite at the level of Astrid or Luke, I believe I have achieved some sort of proficiency when it comes to German transcription. Besides just transcribing the letters, my continued German language education has led me to understand the content a lot better. With my knowledge of German vocabulary and grammar, I have become better at predicting words and comprehending sentences.
The full team meeting this week was educational as always. Brendan gave a presentation on Linked Open Data research for the SAA archive. He showed his sources, methods, and process step by step in an engaging way. While I don’t work for the SAA team, much of the information on Linked Open Data is applicable to my team (the AFSt team). The presentations by both Brendan and Casey in the past few weeks have given me much more confidence in Linked Open Data work, which I started again on Thursday this week. Though I only got an hour into it and didn’t complete much, I feel much better about the process and procedures than I did before.
Overall, this was a very productive week though there were a few difficulties. My dog passed away in the middle of the week which impacted my focus and motivation a bit. I tried to distract myself and push through, but my working pace on Wednesday and Thursday was slower than usual as I had a lot on my mind. I am working on dealing with this grief so my production can be at the highest-level next week.