Week 7 of my internship was a fun and productive week for me highlighted by a meeting for my Mid-Term Evaluation! The week mostly consisted of the same work I have been doing for the past few weeks, but I was also able to do some interesting research and get lots of great constructive feedback.
The majority of my early week consisted of working on entering metadata from the letters of Peter Schafer, who has been the most fascinating figure I have researched so far on the project. Entering the data into Endnote from these letters was quite difficult as the metadata on the spreadsheet from the Francke Stiftungen was quite scant. Due to this lack of information, I had to comb the metadata from the direct transcriptions and documents themselves. Reading through these documents, I uncovered many fascinating stories and developments in the life of Schafer. One letter detailed Schaefer’s trans-Atlantic trip to Pennsylvania and the troubles the crew faced at sea. Another letter was written by Schafer while he had been imprisoned in a castle in Gävle, Sweden. Schafer also mentioned more people in his letters than I had previously seen in other batches, so I got plenty of practice formatting names according to the Endnote protocols.
The team meeting this week felt especially productive, as I was able to get quite a bit of time to talk with the AFSt team to discuss where we are on the project. I had a great conversation with Astrid where we came to a better understanding of the state of the skeletal metadata. It seems that at our current pace, we should be done with this current pass by the end of next week if not sooner! Luke also taught us how to rename documents and how to document the number of pages we have in the files.
On Wednesday, I did a bit of skeletal metadata work and then met with Professor Beiler to go over my Midterm Evaluation. While there were many positives mentioned about what I have done so far, I believe it is most beneficial for me to discuss the constructive criticism I received. We decided that an area I can grow in would be in the area of efficient communication. While I am prompt and dependable at showing up, I have been a bit slower at responding to emails and Teams messages than I should be. This should be an easy fix for me, as long as I make sure to be diligent in checking my messages and am direct in my responses. My main criticism of myself was directed at the pace of my work, but Professor Beiler reminded me that I am still relatively new to the project so I shouldn’t expect myself to be working at the speed that some other team members are. As long as I am working at a steady pace and making improvements over time, I should be able to complete a sufficient amount of work.
Professor Beiler also told me that I will be starting to work with Linked Open Data in the next few weeks, which is quite exciting! There also may be an opportunity to contribute to the PRINT project while I am studying abroad that I will continue to follow. Overall, I have lots to be excited about in PRINT in the very near future!
