I can’t believe its already been six weeks since I started this internship! The time has certainly flown by as I’ve been kept very busy with plenty of different assignments and meetings. This week was no different, consisting of a little bit of transcription, hours of skeletal metadata entry, and of course a few meetings.
The transcription was perhaps the most fun task, as I’ve really enjoyed getting into 17th and 18th century paleography this semester. The document I was given was a 1682 letter from John Ashburn to Phineas Pemberton. I had already done a pass on this document last week, so my main work this week was diving into the trickier words and letters I couldn’t figure out on my first readthrough. After the feedback I received last week, I made sure to look through the transcription protocols thoroughly to make sure my formatting was correct.
This week was by far the most difficult when it came to skeletal metadata, as the metadata spreadsheets for the batches I was viewing were quite sparse on information. The data was there, though I had to do intensive research about the people concerned and read through the documents themselves. For example, one letter’s data did not have anyone listed for the “people mentioned” category, but when I read through the transcription, over 5 people were mentioned by name in the document. This led me to even more trouble, as many of the people listed only had initials or a last name with a Prefix in front. For this debacle I conversed with the AFSt team and read through the Endnote protocols to decide on the best course of action. While we were able to identify Professor Franckens as August Hermann Francke, the other names were put in simply as they appeared in the document according to the Endnote protocols. Since the information in the letter on these people was so sparce, it would be quite difficult to identify if they were a person already listed in the database. As Luke, the AFSt team lead, said, “if there’s no information then don’t assume a correlation”.
The meetings this week were quite exciting, as I got to share some research I had done with the group. I had found a fascinating article on the relationship between Cotton Mather and A.H. Francke, whose correspondence I had been reading through while entering metadata. I was told to then upload the article I had found to the Teams, which I happily did after working through some technical difficulties. The German transcription workshop meeting was quite fun as well, as I continue to get more confident in my pattern recognizing skills. After feeling completely lost the first few weeks, I have become much more proficient at recognizing letters and especially common words. Sadly, there was no English transcription workshop this week.
Overall, this was a fun and productive week that also has some fun news to go with it. This summer I will be attending the UCF Berlin Study Abroad Program! Hopefully in one of the weeks I can take a train down to Halle to see the Franckesche Stiftungen and the city that I’ve read so much about! In the meantime, I will continue working hard to become more knowledgeable on the German pietists and their vast communication networks!
Link to the Research Article I found: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25652076?seq=1
Link to the Letter I transcribed: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/printmigrationnetwork-pemberton/336/