This was the 14th week of my internship with the PRINT project! Though my internship may be coming to an end, my excitement level and workload for the project are still at an all-time high. This week mostly consisted of aspects of the project I haven’t focused on too much. I was able to hone and develop new skills as well as practice ones I already am proficient in.
The majority of my week consisted of doing Linked Open Data work. Using the skills and strategies I had learned from the past few meetings, I did research on specific people before entering that information into the Persons and Places directory. Almost all of the senders and receivers from the AFSt documents we have are fairly well-known, making the research process much easier. I was able to quickly find authority files on Wikidata, VIAF, and the website for the Library of Congress for the majority of the people I was researching. Most of the trouble I had with finding authority files were for those who had names that had many variations. Names such as Peter Schäfer had quite a few variants, so I had to try each one to find the correct authority file. Petrus Schaefer and Petter Schafer (as well as other variations) had to be tried to confirm my findings. I was able to quickly know and find variations, even when they weren’t in the letters from my knowledge on how the different languages interpret the names. A name with an “ä” in it will instead have “ae” in other contexts and languages. Another major variation would be how the eszett (ß) often is changed to a double s (ss) for convenience (or other reasons) in many spellings of names. Since most of the information on the AFSt people is readily acceptable, there weren’t any insane research rabbit holes I had to go down. Very often the person would have an almost fully complete authority file or reliable biography from which I could pull information. I mostly tried to stick to persons whose letters I had personally read so I had background information going in. This decision helped speed up my research process tremendously.
This week I was unable to attend the English transcription workshop, but I was able to make it to the other two meetings. The German transcription workshop was fun as always, with our pace seemingly increasing from week to week. I can understand much more of the documents through my German studies, though many of the archaic words and spellings still confuse me quite a bit. In the team meeting this week we discussed possible blogs we could write to promote the project before finishing slightly early. I used the extra time I had to talk with Astrid about the project and Germany itself. Since she is someone who has spent an extended time in Germany and on the project, her advice and feedback is very important to me. She gave me plenty of insight into her linked open data research and then gave me travel tips for my study abroad this upcoming month.
This week I am excited to work on my Internship Project Showcase presentation to show the faculty what I have done and what I have learned from PRINT!