The third week of my Spring internship with the PRINT (People, Religion, Information Networks and Travel) project was the most eventful and educational so far. I was able to start working on my specific duties while continuing to learn new skills.
To begin the week, the general meeting had all teams get together to discuss their past progress and immediate goals. I was able to learn more about the state of the AFSt team, and our timeline of goals for the future. After a bit of confusion, I was finally able to get all the clarifications I needed to begin working on my independent study.
My individual work consisted of creating an batch on Endnote to eventually upload to Zooniverse. This long-term project was to contain about 50 letters that coincided with a particular theme. After discussing the project at the team meeting with Luke, the AFSt (Archives of the Frankesche Stiftungen) team lead, I settled on “travel networks” as the main theme of the batch. I then spent most of my hours this week reading through abstracts and keywords to place letters pertaining to travel networks in a spreadsheet. This was meticulous work, as I had to make sure every document ID, sender, and receiver was correct. I also had to check to confirm that each document had an image in the team’s files. Though this process was time confusing and frustrating at first, I eventually was able to get in a groove and make plenty of progress.
Just as I did last week, I attended the two transcription workshops that the project offers: German transcription Tuesday and English transcription Thursday. The more examples of 17th century letters I see the better I have become at transcribing them. During these workshops, I am able to transcribe a few lines in real time with immediate feedback from those with much more experience than me. The more experienced project members have shown me skills such as how to recognize patterns and use context to figure out complicated letters and words. I was also able to get some feedback on my individual transcription from last week, and was proud of the progress I had made so far. Though many corrections had to made, I felt that I was on the right track to transcription competency.
Overall I felt that this was the first week I really understood what was expected of me and what work I had to get done. I felt that I was able to meaningfully contribute to the project without intruding on anyone else's time or work.